The Late-Career Novelist: Career Construction Theory, Authors and Autofiction 9781350030060, 9781350030091, 9781350030077

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The Late-​Career Novelist

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Also Available from Bloomsbury Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-​First Century British Novels, Peter Childs and James Green British Fictions of the Sixties, Sebastian Groes

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The Late-​Career Novelist Career Construction Theory, Authors and Autofiction Hywel Dix

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Hywel Dix, 2017 Hywel Dix has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​3500-​3006-​0 ePDF: 978-​1-​3500-​3007-​7 ePub: 978-​1-​3500-​3008-​4 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Dix, Hywel Rowland, author. Title: The late-career novelist : career construction theory, authors and autofiction / Hywel Dix. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016055074| ISBN 9781350030060 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350030084 (epub) | ISBN 9781350030077 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction–20th century–History and criticism. | English fiction–21st century–History and criticism. | Authorship–History–20th century. | Authorship–History–21st century. | Authorship–Psychological aspects. | Literature publishing–History–20th century. | Literature publishing–History–21st century. | Career development. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. Classification: LCC PR881 .D59 2017 | DDC 823/.91409–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055074 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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For Rosie with love

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Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction: From the Late to the Retrospective The Dialogic Self and the Vocation of the Storyteller Imaginary Authors of Real Books Intimate Paratexts Cultural Narratives and the Collective Library Feeding Fiction Forward: Anxieties of Influence Autofiction in Theory and Practice Conclusion: Advancing the Occupational Plot

Bibliography Index

1 37 59 85 109 135 157 181 203 213

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Introduction: From the Late to the Retrospective

An opening question: When we consider the life and work of a particular writer, how often do we come to the conclusion that that author’s masterpiece –​his or her career-​defining work –​also happened to be one of his or her last pieces of work? We are quite accustomed to thinking about artists and writers through recourse to a retrospectively created series of stages or phases, so it is perfectly possible to talk about Joseph Conrad:  the major phase; or T.  S. Eliot’s major poetical works or the late plays of Shakespeare.1 But rarely, if ever, does the idea of the major work coincide with the final stage of the career. On the contrary, the very idea of a major phase implies a subsequent later phase that is somehow less significant or more minor and therefore somehow less innovative or less important than the works produced during the writer’s so-​called major phase. This book argues that whereas much critical attention has been devoted to establishing the idea of a major phase and hence to the transition between early and mature works of an author’s career, the late stage has received comparably less attention. Along with this idea, however, it also puts forward a second and related argument that the concept of the ‘late’ stage has not been well defined and is in need of rigorous critical interrogation and provisional clarification. In other words, the two problems to be explored during this study are why the late works are often critically neglected and what constitutes lateness in the first place. These problems are particularly acute when considering contemporary literature:  we are given to think of the idea of the contemporary as something existing rather than something concluded, so the idea of the late-​career stage of certain contemporary writers has barely been operative at all.2 One of the results of this has been a peculiar distancing or historical displacing of the contemporary, whereby significant contemporary writers are primarily associated with work that they produced years or even decades earlier, rather than with their current work.3

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For example, in an important study of Artistic Capital (2006) David Galenson has done much to enhance our understanding of how some authors flower relatively early, while others fulfil their artistic visions very late on, if at all. Yet he consciously excluded living and recently deceased writers on the grounds that ‘their careers are incomplete’ and ‘critical evaluations of their entire careers … are relatively scarce’.4 His study of the careers of twelve novelists included none born after 1900 and in effect was unable to challenge the already existing mechanics of literary canonization that he found. In other words, the study reaffirmed a definition of literary worth based on a notion of individual creative genius, which is a concept that has come under increasing critical scrutiny in recent years. Moreover, the notion of genius is often accompanied by the category of the masterpiece with the implication that after his or her definitive masterpiece, an author produces little or nothing as worthwhile. This also was one implication of Galenson’s study. My purpose here is not to engage in a critique of Galenson, who made a major contribution to identifying the different potential stages in artistic life cycles. It is, however, to emphasize how common and hence unchallenged the assumption of a literary and artistic decline wrought by the process of ageing has become. To challenge the idea of distinct major and minor phases is also to challenge a cultural and social hierarchy based on age. At the same time, to question the idea that the best works of an author’s career are located in a phase some time before the last period of his or her career is to challenge also certain assumptions and definitions about what constitutes the best work and hence to contest the criteria of judgement. This is not simply to acknowledge that the late stage of a career and hence the late stage of a lived lifetime can be creative and innovative in valuable and original ways –​although such an acknowledgement is an important argument in its own right. It is to argue over and above such an acknowledgement that the kinds of works produced during the late-​career stage are necessarily different from the kinds of works a writer is able to produce during the earlier stages. In this sense, ‘stage’ rather than ‘age’ is very compellingly the focus of the argument. Regardless of their age, writers in the later stages of their careers are necessarily caught in a creative tension between originality and habit, or between repetition and newness, so that the work produced during the latter stages often becomes profoundly metafictive as the writer in question returns to the forms, themes and techniques of the earlier work for which he or she has become celebrated, and writes about them again –​in a new way. From the beginning, therefore, it is necessary to clarify how I will use the term late.

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Introduction

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Rethinking lateness, the belated and the retrospective In Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Edward Said identified four typical kinds of ‘conflicts’ that commonly occur during an authorial career. The first of these was what he called the writer’s life as ‘active writer’.5 In effect, this is a conflict between the author’s life as author (the precious time devoted to writing) and the author’s life as a human being, involved in all sorts of other relationships, tasks, roles, dilemmas and even other careers. This conflict is likely to be particularly acute for authors at an early stage in their career before they have achieved sufficient critical and/​or commercial success to earn their living solely from writing, when they might be working full time in other roles, perhaps raising children or caring for relatives and having to squeeze their writerly selves into a very small portion of the total time and mental energy available to them. This of course has been a particular challenge for female authors. The early-​career stage is one where it is by no means clear that the author is destined to achieve a successful career in writing as such, which remains a combination of aspiration and open question. Since the writer at the early stage cannot be certain of achieving the establishment of an authorial career, writing exists as a vocation, or perhaps as a career-​in-​potential, rather than as a career as such  –​although it will be argued below that how both the early stage and the idea of a vocation have been constructed is problematic. The second conflict is likely to arise once writing itself has become a full-​ time occupation. During this stage the writer develops a characteristic style: a recurring set of themes, a distinctive idiom, a greater or lesser degree of formal experimentation and so on. But of course, to choose and develop those themes, that idiom and that high or low level of generic innovation is also necessarily to leave certain other paths not taken. The conflict, in other words, is between the kind of writer the writer chooses to be and the other kinds of writers that he or she could have become. The different factors that contribute to making these choices have not been well understood or analysed in the past but can be seen as important paratexts for the discussion of the career as a whole. The third kind of conflict takes place when the author is assumed to be at the height of his or her creative powers  –​although again, how the idea of a high point has been culturally constructed, along with its implication of a subsequent decline or falling off in creativity, will be questioned further over the course of the coming pages. But whether or not it depends on the author reaching a putative zenith in his or her creative art, Said’s third kind of conflict in the authorial career is between ‘innovation and repetition’ or between ‘novelty and

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habit’.6 It is a conflict that is likely to arise once the writer has become known for producing certain kinds of works, which in turn is likely to happen at a stage when the very name of the writer in question serves as a hallmark or indicator of assumed intrinsic worth, so that the name alone becomes a signature underwriting the effective prolongation of the career. This is not the quite same as the ‘name of  the  author’ defined by Foucault’s author function, which argues that our idea of the author is an effect of the writing that we ‘construct’ during reading, rather than its instigator.7 Nevertheless, implicit in Said’s account of the main conflicts that comprise the authorial career is the idea that the figure (as opposed to the ‘function’) of the author emerges partly as a result of participation in those conflicts and partly through the realization of all those different texts, articles, reviews and so on that he or she has been involved in producing. The fourth and final conflict Said identifies is typically associated with the late-​career stage. It arises when the author and his or her public sense that the most significant creative achievements are already behind him or her but the writer is likely to feel impelled to go on writing since it is not a career from which many people retire. The ironic effect of this continued written experimentation even after the apprehension that the best might already be past is that writing returns to the status that it enjoyed in the early active stage: it is a vocation again. There are a number of problems with Said’s account of these four conflicts. First of all, his overall argument is that the concept of a ‘career’ as such came into being some time towards the end of the nineteenth century and that within literary history there is therefore a discernible shift from writing as a vocation (prior to that date) towards writing as a professional career (in the twentieth century).8 This overlooks the possibility that even in the twentieth (and twenty-​ first) century, potential writers starting out on the path are themselves involved in writing as a vocation for the reason stated above: they cannot be certain of achieving a career as writers. In other words, Said’s model of the four conflicts is contradictory in a temporal sense. On the one hand he suggests that any of the four conflicts might arise at any point in an authorial career; on the other hand some of them seem more likely to arise at certain career stages than others. This contradiction gives rise to the feeling that they are cumulative or successive rather than coinciding. More significantly, the idea of a high point (third conflict) implies a sense of decline (fourth conflict) that is in turn tacitly associated with old age and a loss of control of the creative faculties. This idea of a peak followed by a decline due to the process of ageing is utterly uninterrogated by Said and has in fact become very commonly entrenched in literary discussion. It is possible that

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had he pursued his interest in career research further, Said himself may have elaborated in a deeper and more complex way upon some of the questions that Beginnings opens up. Instead, the publication of his pioneering work Orientalism (1978) three years after Beginnings led to his work being very strongly associated with the then-​nascent field of postcolonial studies, which he is often, somewhat hyperbolically, credited with having founded. Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans suggest that one result of his close association with this field was that he was unable to pursue the idea of the literary career as a potential area of research that had been launched in Beginnings.9 This book challenges the idea of a career high point and subsequent decline that has hitherto been largely unquestioned in literary research by freeing the construction of different career stages from biological age and suggesting instead that how the different stages of a given authorial career are constructed is specific to that career. In other words, the late-​career stage need not be seen as one of decline but can be better understood in a relational sense, in the full context of the career as a whole, where the lateness of the stage is defined by what has come before and is not merely an effect of age. This means that work produced during that stage has certain properties and characteristics, some of them intrinsic to the text and some of them extrinsic, that is, pertinent to the life and career of the author rather than to the text itself, which renders such work analytically distinct. In turn these properties elicit a different kind of reading compared to work produced in an earlier stage. I shall therefore follow the method adumbrated by Wayne C.  Booth in The Company We Keep (1988) in trying to interpret such texts in the way they ‘invite’ us to read them.10 Perhaps conscious of having said less in Beginnings about the late phase than about the other phases that compose an authorial career, and apparently conscious also of having entered his own last phase, Said made late-​career works the subject of his last, unfinished and posthumously published work, On Late Style (2005), a work that ranges widely across music and literature, mainly from within the Western canon. On Late Style reinvigorated the concept of lateness and served as a stimulus to further theoretical research and analysis of late works. The great strength of the book is that in it Said identified the possible stylistic features associated with lateness. For example, he makes a distinction between two different kinds of late ‘style’. First there is a version of late style in which the artist knows that the end is coming and uses the last phase to produce work that is serene and harmonious, as if to reconcile himself or herself peaceably to the approaching finality of death. This is the kind of style Said finds in Shakespeare’s late plays. By contrast, he

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suggests that some artists have refused to become reconciled to the approach of death in such a harmonious way and have produced late works of a raw and savage power that cannot easily be accommodated to existing political or aesthetic sensibilities. This is what he finds in the late work of Ibsen. Throughout On Late Style it is the second, discordant and unaccommodated, version of lateness that Said is really interested in. In his earlier Representations of the Intellectual (1994) he had argued that the public intellectual is someone who must maintain a critical distance from cultural and institutional sources of authority in order to be able to critique them in a disinterested way. For this reason, he had suggested, the most effective source of theoretical critique in a given field is often somebody who is an amateur in that field rather than working directly within its principal organizations. Amateurs are potentially rich sources of critique because their public self-​representation, career progression and opportunities for success and advancement do not depend on their capacity to become accommodated to the ideas and activities of the leaders in that field, from whom they can thus maintain a critical separation. What he says about late style is an extension of his earlier work about the outsider status of public intellectuals: that if late works were valued because they represented too serene an accommodation with the existing social order, then the capacity of the artist to enter into a critical creative dialogue with existing sources of power would be incorporated in them and hence undermined. Since its capacity to participate actively in social and historical process is more or less how Said defines art in the first place, this would be tantamount to art abdicating its own properties. Any rigorous critique of work produced during the late-​career stage should not be content to allow this to happen out of some sympathetic sense of the weakening effects of old age. On the contrary, Said says that if the late works are to be taken seriously at all, then they should be interpreted with the same scrupulous rigour as all the earlier works, and no allowances made. Thus, he says, ‘late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality’.11 The power of late style is for this reason a negative power: the negation of conformity. If he is successful in identifying the characteristic features associated with late work, however, Said is less successful in defining the concept of lateness itself from either a temporal or a conceptual, perspectival viewpoint. In fact, in On Late Style he discusses at least five different kinds of lateness without pausing to marshal them into a systematic theoretical framework for critical discussion of the concept. Thus ‘late’, in Said’s account, variously refers to the very last works of art created after a lengthy career has already been achieved and typically shortly before death; work produced in old age, even in cases where

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the work in question might be the first piece of work that artist ever produces; work produced towards the end of any synchronically defined period of history; any piece of work that revisits thematic material that has already been explicitly portrayed by one or more prior artists or generations; and finally to all works of the twentieth century –​which in Said’s account are assumed to have an inherent belatedness compared to the cultural work of other periods. It should be noted that Said uses these definitions of lateness more or less interchangeably without pausing to clarify the distinctions between them that have been extrapolated here. Indeed, the notion of lateness is taken for granted to the extent that it is never defined in theory, but that same taken-​for-​ grantedness is undermined by the imprecision with which the term is used. Both the undermining and the imprecision indicate that a new critical interrogation of the concept of lateness is required. This situation contrasts with Said’s earlier Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), which had provided a rigorous theoretical critique of the positivistic tendencies of such synchronic histories as those associated with Western imperialism, and paved the way for a more nuanced, diachronic reading of world history. It is therefore surprising that in On Late Style he does not manage to distinguish between different ways of conceptualizing either individual life stages or collective historical periods, and hence is unable to make a theoretical distinction between different ways of situating lateness. This means that all his examples of work produced towards the end of a given historical period come from periods of Western history. In contrast, Japanese writer Takashi Hiraide’s memoir The Guest Cat (2014) is a poetic account of the transition in Japanese history from the Showa era (1926–​89) into the Heisei period (1989–​present)  –​a time that in the West was not characterized as one of epochal change. In addition to its distinctive situating of lateness within a non-​Western historical period, The Guest Cat is also about the different stages that constitute a writer’s career: Hiraide’s own. He writes about the fact that during the 1980s he resigned from a publishing company and moved into a leafy Tokyo suburb to concentrate on writing full time. In other words, the act of writing is only one component of a career in writing that consists of a number of different stages. Having moved to Tokyo, Hiraide recalls being visited regularly by a stray cat whose visits had a pace and rhythm consonant with a writer’s life.12 Since the visits are fleeting and impermanent, the cat becomes a symbol for Hiraide’s real theme:  the transition of Japan’s old order into the modern age. This means that the transition that was taking place in Japanese history is paralleled by a transition in Hiraide’s career as writer.13

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Hiraide’s compatriot Haruki Murakami uses a somewhat different metaphor for the different stages that make up a career in writing. In What I Talk about When I Talk about Running (2008), Murakami discusses a relationship between being a writer and being a runner. This relationship is partly metaphorical, at the level of building up the required level of stamina, endurance and self-​discipline necessary to complete a novel or finish a marathon.14 It is also, however, partly mechanical. This is because Murakami (like Hiraide) became a writer as a result of a career change, where his previous career had been running a jazz bar in a fashionable part of Tokyo. He notes that once he sold the bar to concentrate on writing, his life became much less active than it had been and so he took up running as a means of maintaining physical fitness. That in turn contributed to his maintaining a degree of mental agility when writing.15 Murakami also identifies an important third parallel between writing a novel and running a marathon. He was almost sixty when What I  Talk about When I Talk about Running was published. Having continued to run a marathon every year, he had become aware that it was now physically impossible for him to beat his best time for completing the distance. This did not mean that he gave up running, but indicates a necessary shift in how he was able to measure his performance. ‘In long-​distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.’16 More specifically, for a marathon runner in his fifties, ‘beating’ his earlier self refers less to completing the course in a faster time, and more to overcoming the expectation of what can be achieved now that had been created by what was achieved twenty years earlier. That is, it implies a shift from an objective notion of the ‘best’ to one that is not only specific to him as an individual, but that is partial, provisional and subject to continual revalidation. Murakami goes on to claim that that the ‘same can be said about … the novelist’s profession’.17 Following Murakami, it will be argued here that late-​career fictional work will also often suffer if it is compared to what comes before and might be more positively interpreted when taken on its own distinct terms (although for the reasons explained above, I will also re-​conceptualize the definition of lateness). In a major study of how Shakespeare’s late works have been constructed as such, Gordon McMullan has analysed the ‘invention’ of late Shakespeare during the romantic period.18 Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins draw on McMullan’s work to suggest that a conventional decline narrative ironically contributes to the mechanics of literary canonization (and hence also to the marginalization and exclusion of what is not canonized) since ‘to embody the qualities of late style you have to be, or once have been, a genius’.19 David Smit’s study of the late style of Henry James identifies in James a prominent example of the association of lateness

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with ‘ingenuity’.20 It is particularly pertinent to this study since a discussion of Henry James had earlier been the occasion for F. O. Matthiessen to introduce the concept of a ‘major phase’, specifically in relation to James’s ‘late flowering’.21 McMullan, Chambers and Watkins and Smit all challenge the conventional assumption of a decline in narrative mastery during the late period and McMullan in particular draws attention to how the entity of lateness has itself to be constructed and can accordingly be contested. Working in the area of critical gerontology, Peter Laslett has identified some of the cultural and historical means by which different life stages more generally have been created and recognized as normative. In a work that explicitly aimed to challenge the common association of loss of creativity with ageing, he proposes to replace the normal assumption that life can be split into three stages (i.e. youth, middle age and old age) with a four-​stage model. This has the advantage, in his account, of moving the ‘peak’ to a later period in life than would otherwise be the case. More significantly, Laslett also suggests that the different life stages need not be successive, and that they can often be experienced concurrently. This insight is a major innovation in considering lateness, because it decreases the reliance of definitions of each stage on a simplistic set of temporal, chronological data. Or as Laslett puts it, ‘[i]‌t follows logically enough that the ages should not be looked upon exclusively as stretches of years, and the possibility has to be contemplated that the Third Age could be lived simultaneously with the Second Age, or even with the First.’22 In other words, life stage ceases to be an effect of mere age. Margaret Gullette has explored in detail how cultural processes construct a whole series of social assumptions about ageing rather than merely reflecting it as a neutral process.23 Kathleen Woodward has shown that age intersects with gender in ways that complicate the cultural construction of each.24 Liberating different life stages from numerical biological age clearly has important implications for how we think about lateness in the context of a literary career. Rather than segregated from earlier stages by arbitrary temporal boundaries, lateness then becomes something related to, instead of divorced from, the earlier stages. Examples that Laslett provides of the concurrent experience of different life stages are the careers of artists and athletes, who –​in different ways –​can live different phases of life simultaneously. In a critique of the typical decline narrative that associates ageing with loss of creativity once an imagined high point has been passed, he argues that: No passage from one to the other need occur, for an individual with these characteristics is doing his or her own thing from maturity until the final end. Artists, the consummate artists, are the best examples. An athlete, on the other

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If the high point of professional achievement comes at different ages in different kinds of careers, and even in different individual careers, the idea of a prime followed by a period of decline is overhauled and replaced with a new way both to situate the idea of the late stage and to evaluate works produced in that stage. This discovery leads me to a provisional answer to the question of how to define lateness in the context of a literary career. Throughout these pages, ‘late’ will be defined as a connecting rather than a purely temporal concept, as coming after (an already achieved novel, play, piece of work, life stage or career phase) rather than moving towards (death, retirement, historical and/​or epochal change). In other words, although many so-​called late works are often written during their author’s period of ageing, their lateness is not an effect of biological age and should be seen as a relational construct. The lateness of the late works, what makes it meaningfully possible to discuss them as such, is then defined by the relationship itself. Late works are temporally belated relative to those that came before them and with which they enter into a creative and critical dialogue. Because this way of figuring lateness liberates the concept itself from mere biological age, it would be possible to consider a particular work as belated even if written by an author in his or her thirties or forties –​provided it comes after an even earlier achievement. For this reason, I shall follow Jenny Hockey and Allison James in suggesting that the term late is better replaced by the idea of the retrospective to avoid conflating the late with simplistic questions of numerical age.26 This is how Bran Nicol employs the term ‘retrospective’ in a study of the late work of Iris Murdoch.27 This substitution of the surface idea of ‘late’ with a more complex idea of the retrospective generates a potential new category for discussion, that of fictions of self-​retrospect. It is a category that makes it possible to consider late-​career works in the relational –​as opposed to biological –​sense described above. Or to put it another way, thinking about fictions of self-​retrospect in the way they ask to be read is a way of thinking about them not defined by some kind of deficiency or lack relative to works produced earlier in the authorial career, but as a specific kind of work and achievement that can only be produced during that career stage. What is specific to fictions of self-​retrospect, in other words, is not that they are less creative or less original than the works produced during the earlier career stages. Rather it is that they are situated by their relationship to what has come before.

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More specifically, the retrospective stage of an author’s career can only be defined through recourse to other stages in that specific career, and does not occur at a pre-​determined age or point in time. This means that the different stages that comprise the career are generated by the career in process and are different for every career, and cannot be generalized. In other words, it is not a question of imposing an arbitrary age boundary at which a writer can be considered to have entered a retrospective stage, since, as we have seen, the whole point of substituting the idea of the retrospective for that of the merely late is to liberate critical discussion of lateness from exclusive focus on age. In effect, this means that different authorial careers are constructed in ways that are particular to themselves. To see how each career and the different stages within it are constructed, we must look at the particular properties of each rather than at extrinsically defined surface data. Fictions of self-​retrospect are those works of fiction that are produced in the retrospective stage, where the retrospective stage is defined in this specific and variable way. This means they are distinct from works produced during other stages although they might evince a high degree of continuity with them. They often also exist in a metatextual dimension commensurate with a high level of critical self-​reflection and authorial self-​renewal.

Rethinking the literary career The idea of the authorial career as a fertile area of research that might enable new and illuminating interpretations of an author’s work is a relatively new one. Davidson and Evans have argued that until recently the writer’s career, where it was discussed at all, tended to be discussed on a surface factual level, as an offshoot of the separate subgenre of literary biography, rather than as a constitutive and therefore also potentially interpretative context for the writer’s work.28 But over the last thirty years, the growing research field known as book history has drawn attention to the material conditions in which literary production takes place, and to how those historically variable conditions contribute both to shaping what forms of literature are produced and how they are read. During the same period, the idea of the authorial career as itself comprising certain discernible properties that also contribute to the historic variability of literary production has received less attention. Implicit throughout this book is the assumption that a literary career, though intangible in the most literal way, is a particular kind of entity with specific properties, characteristics, relationships

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and limitations that are all in need of further research and critical interrogation in a material sense. That is, the book will argue that alterations in the material conditions of a career has an indirect but traceable impact on the work produced at different stages of that career and hence –​at least potentially –​on how that work can be read. After Edward Said, the second most significant early proponent of authorial career research as an important component of literary research was Wayne C. Booth. Just as Said has subsequently been assimilated to the field of postcolonial studies to the detriment of his work as a theorist of literary careers, so too Booth has become primarily associated with the field of reader research, especially through his relationship with his former doctoral student Peter Rabinowitz. However, in The Company We Keep (1988) Booth made three major contributions to literary career research. First of all, he developed a notion of ethical reading. By this he meant the possibility that reading fiction can somehow change us in our core values and hence in our sense of who we are and what we stand for. That is, the ethical reading practice that he adumbrated was not really a matter of judging whether the ‘effects’ of certain kinds of reading are beneficial or harmful after we have engaged in them, in a sociological sense; he is more interested in what happens during the process of reading itself. To him, an ethical reading is one in which the reader holds herself open to the possibility of being changed by it. In doing so, readers create their own characters, their own provisional and variable sense of who they are, at least partly in response to their ‘imaginative diet’.29 Since it raises the possibility that reading fiction can contribute to changing the values and attitudes of the reader, it can bring about a varying set of behaviours in a vocational sense. This in turn means (to Booth) that the experience of reading can make a difference to the reader’s chosen spheres of work and hence to his or her career choices. In choosing to become this kind of person, not that, during this period of time, not that, there is a direct continuity between the ethics of reading and potentially life-​altering decisions about vocation and professional pathway: Some of the roles opened to me as I move through the field of selves that my cultural moment provides will be good for ‘me/​us’, some not so good, some literally fatal. It will be the chief and most difficult business of my life to grope my way along dimly lit paths, hoping to build a life-​‘plot’ that will be in one of the better genres.30

Booth’s account of the potential role played by fiction in the reader’s personal, vocational and professional decisions anticipates the much more recent field

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of career construction theory in a number of important ways. As I will show below, career construction employs a narrative method in which counsellors encourage their clients to consider what kind of ideas, attitudes, behaviours and personal qualities they value. One of the means by which they do this, as anticipated by Booth in The Company We Keep, is by asking the client to consider which fictional characters they most admire. Moreover, just as Booth makes recourse to a number of literary metaphors for conceptualizing the life course as a whole, with all its different plots, subplots, genres and chapters, so too practitioners of career construction encourage their clients to envisage themselves as authors of their own life stories rather than merely passive observers of it. This shift in emphasis from passive recipient to active creator has a number of further implications, as we shall see. For now, it is enough to suggest that the significance of Booth’s ideas lies in the association of reading fiction with life/​career choices. If this component of career research traceable to Booth is mainly about the ethical and hence vocational and professional decisions made by the reader, The Company We Keep also made a second major contribution to the field of authorial career research. This was Booth’s realization that within the writer’s life, the periods of time spent not writing are not irrelevant to the process of literary creation and are themselves in some sense formative. More specifically, he focused his attention on a number of responsibilities implied in the overall process of literary creation. These responsibilities equate to a number of different social relationships in which the author is involved, such as to one or more readers; to the work itself; to those whose lives are used as raw material; to those others whose labour is required to make the work possible; and even to abstract entities such as ‘truth’ and ‘posterity’.31 Perhaps most notably in this context, he also discussed the author’s responsibility to him or herself as a human being situated in a material world where the practice of art is only one of many different roles. As with the first of Said’s conflicts, Booth’s notion of authorial responsibility to self suggests an unresolved and maybe unresolvable tension between the devotion of effort, time and energy to the practice of fiction and to all sorts of other necessary activities. In Booth’s account, the sheer effort necessary to produce a written work and so become an author involves living for a long time in this multiplicity of roles, with the effect that in making the work the author is also in a sense creating himself as such: ‘To dwell with a creative task for as long as is required to perform it well means that one tends to become the work  –​at least to some degree’.32 This acknowledgement of the writer’s life outside writing and of other kinds of experiences that

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The Late-Career Novelist

conflict with the writing in the course of the life is an early consideration of career criticism. It should be noted that since he is interested in developing an ethics of reading, Booth also identifies and analyses a number of different responsibilities on the part of the reader. However, for the purposes of tracing his contribution to career research, it is the relationships and responsibilities involving the author that are more germane. They reveal that the writer’s life aside from time spent at his desk and the active collaboration with other kinds of professionals have a constitutive role to play in shaping the finished work. This new emphasis in turn demystifies the inherited romantic image of the solitary author working in isolation to produce a work of individual genius and so posits a version of literary creation that is social rather than individualistic. Booth uses the term ‘career author’ in an attempt to conceptualize the (then) newly socialized figure of the author.33 Though he does not define precisely what he means by the term, the two main properties of the ‘career author’ as an analytic construct seem to be collaboration and mutability. That is, the career author is necessarily involved in a network of relationships with editors, publishers, distributors, proof-​readers, friends, relatives and loved ones in a way that explodes the idea of the solitary genius. Similarly, the career author is an author whose career might comprise several distinct and different stages, thus replacing the idea of a singularity of artistic vision with the possibility of becoming several different kinds of authors during the course of the career. Indeed, this latter point gives rise to a particular challenge for authors in different stages of their careers, since our image of the career author can impede our judgement of works produced during those stages if ‘we insist that an author’s new work maintain the ethos we have constructed from earlier works’.34 Booth’s resolution to this problem of late-​career authorship is again a question of ethical reading. A  reader who has been impressed by a given author’s early works might ‘feel a greater responsibility to do justice to his next tale, even if it might initially prove less inviting than the others’.35 It will be argued throughout these pages that doing the subsequent works justice in this way will involve acknowledging that they are necessarily different from the earlier works because the author has entered a new career stage. All of Booth’s examples of ‘career authors’ date from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries: Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Norman Mailer, George Orwell. Booth thus anticipates Joe Moran’s later more explicitly career-​focused research, which found that ‘professionalization of authorship’ took place from the early nineteenth century onwards and ‘coincided with the rise of literature as a commodity

15

Introduction

15

within a broader system of market exchange’ when ‘authorship became entangled with a developing industry of advertising and publicity’.36 After vocational choice and author self-​responsibility, this sense of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century specificity is Booth’s third major contribution to literary career research. Said, Booth and Moran all agree that many of the changes in social and economic relationship brought about during the Industrial Revolution created the conditions in which authorship as a career became possible. This of course is not least because that same period also gave rise to the cultural creation of the concept of a professional ‘career’ more generally. My intention here is not to repeat many of those arguments that have now become familiar, even though career research as a branch of literary study remains somewhat underdeveloped. (Indeed, even where it has been practised, it has tended to be associated with classical and/​or canonical authors rather than more recent writers).37 My somewhat different aim is to suggest that just as the changing industrial conditions of the nineteenth century gave rise both to the concept of a professional career in general, and to an authorial career more specifically, so too industrial and employment conditions at the start of the twenty-​first century have changed again, in a way that necessitates new thinking about the concept of a career. More than ever before, an unfolding career is likely to comprise several discrete and discernible stages. These arise not just as one achieves promotion and rises through the ranks of a particular organization, or even as one changes between different organizations in order to achieve a higher level of status or seniority in a given field. They arise also as an individual’s career is increasingly likely to involve not only different employers but in many cases also radically different kinds of employers and different kinds of work. The now historical assumption of a job for life has been gradually eroded and replaced with a series of provisional, varying and often unrelated areas of professional and vocational activity, in a way that makes new thinking about career development necessary and timely. The central thesis of this book is that the area of psychology known as career construction theory provides a useful critical vocabulary and conceptual model for thinking about the different phases that comprise a given career. This is because, as the American counsellor Mark Savickas explains in Career Counseling (2011), an important stimulus for the development of his practice was generated by the uncertain employment conditions created by rapidly changing economic patterns, especially in post-​industrial societies at the turn of the century. Career construction theory comprises four major elements, which can be described as its narrative process for career counselling; a practice of

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The Late-Career Novelist

meta-​reflection in response to one or more career problems; the association of career stages with particular micro-​narratives; and finally the provision of logical continuity across different life stages by one or more life themes. Before considering whether career construction theory can be applied to literary career research, and in order to define the parameters of the field, it is worth exploring each of these in turn.

A narrative process As one of the leading exponents of career construction theory, Savickas began Career Counseling (2011) by suggesting that career theories emphasizing stability and continuity were inappropriate to what he calls the ‘postmodern economy’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, in which frequent change and flexibility had become a regular part of the pattern of working life.38 By contrast, a theoretical approach to career trajectories that identifies different ways of managing evolving career stages in a fluid and dynamic way was more applicable to the needs and circumstances of an increasing number of people. This is the first context in which career construction theory should be understood. Stephen Katz has shown that how people in Western societies imagined the shape of their lifespan during the renaissance was fundamentally different to how the lifespan came to be reckoned from the nineteenth century onwards, and these were both different from how the lifespan is commonly envisaged at the start of the twenty-​first century.39 The decline of religious sensibility and growth of the secular imagination is one major factor in this shift. The process vaguely referred to as globalization is another. If the concept of a career was culturally created during the nineteenth century in the context of a wider change in how people thought about their lives, how we think about these things has changed again in the twenty-​first century –​hence the need for a new form of career counselling. Like the idea of the lifespan and the related notion of the career, career counselling itself has a particular material history. According to McMahon and Watson, career counselling arose early in the twentieth century and subsequently evolved through three distinct stages: an early practice of career ‘guidance’, followed by career ‘development’ in mid-​century and then supplemented in turn by the recent emergence of ‘career construction’.40 Kobus Maree complicates the picture by suggesting that the history of career counselling consists of four rather than three waves which, starting with the work of Frank Parsons

17

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on vocational guidance in 1908, correspond approximately to four periods in twentieth-​century Western economic development.41 There is consensus, however, that career construction is a fundamentally new and decisive kind of career counselling as distinct from the practices associated with the earlier periods: vocational guidance and career education. Both of these earlier practices carried the risk that, if implemented unsuccessfully, they might reduce the client to a series of scores in aptitude and personality tests. The key innovation of career construction theory is to depart from an object-​orientated method that would simply match individuals with roles, and instead enable the client to see the career itself as being the subject of an on-​going, dynamic process of redefinition and critical reflection. As a result, and unlike those other areas of guidance practice, career construction theory introduces new elements of dialogism and narrative. The new paradigm that it brings forward moves away from notions of the self that are essentialist and unchanging; and embraces a sense of the self as always coming into being through social construction and interaction, with the individual career being a manifestation of that narrative of the self. Or as Savickas puts it, ‘[c]‌areer counselling, from the project perspective of individual design, views clients as authors who may be characterized by autobiographical stories and who may be helped to reflect on life themes with which to construct their careers.’42 Larry Cochran conceptualizes what is distinctive about career construction compared to other forms of career counselling by comparing it to a more traditional practice known (after Williamson) as the ‘trait-​factor approach’.43 This is an approach that conceives of the counsellor as a databank of potential career options into which the requirements of the client are fed so that a particular professional role can be matched with those requirements and then spat back out for the client. The trait-​factor approach, which has more recently been referred to technically as ‘person-​environment fit’, frequently employs computerized databases in this more or less mechanistic way.44 Cochran argues that these systems-​ based approaches to career counselling are not without value. However, their very systematic nature means that they are unable to situate the potential career decisions people make in the context of the client’s life more generally, where there are often all sorts of other complex and complicating factors and emotions at work. Like Savickas, he also implies that it would be foolish to assume that a counsellor can simply match the client to an ideal role and then send that client off to perform that role for the rest of his working life. Career conditions in the postmodern economy that Savickas describes simply do not work like that in many cases.

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The Late-Career Novelist

Cochran therefore suggests that the systems approach to career counselling should be supplemented with a narrative approach that is expansive, open-​ ended and capable of incorporating life complexity and emotional fragility in the process by which career decisions are made. That is, practitioners of career construction theory enter into a dialogue with their clients in order to establish the client’s most fundamental values so that these, rather than a list of factual information or raw data from a computer, can be configured into a narrative of the individual’s life history. If a purely test-​based or quantitative approach were taken, this would see a person as merely an ‘organism with attributes, no order of meaning’.45 In career construction, the counsellor and the client co-​create a narrative of the client’s life that enables that person to identify potential future developments in his or her own story not simply by identifying appropriate facts but by ascribing individual meaning and significance to them through narrative. Two clients with outwardly similar skills, qualifications and career histories might be driven by a number of different sets of desires, emotions, relationships and commitments at a much deeper level and it is this latent level of meaning that the storied approach to career counselling can elicit. Cochran defines the difference between career construction and earlier forms of counselling as that between ‘matching and emplotment’.46 In effect, it posits the clients as both authors and protagonists of their own life stories, motivated by a range of different outward goals and inner motivations. For this reason, the most important insight of career construction theory is that although different careers are likely to consist of a number of different career stages, there is no one-​size-​fits-​all model. On the contrary, the boundary between one life and/​or career stage and another can only be determined by the person in question as an individual, as can the qualitative definition of what constitutes success in each stage. This again is likely to vary significantly not only between individuals but also for the same individual across time. The fastest Murakami could complete a marathon in his sixties was not the same as he achieved in his thirties, but it remained nevertheless a particular success in this provisional –​as opposed to objective –​manner. Success is therefore a variable concept because what matters to people, what they are trying to achieve, varies over time. Like its second cousin psychoanalysis, the primary source of theoretical material for understanding career construction often takes the form of written case studies. Jennifer Del Corso and Mark C. Rehfuss suggest that there remains a ‘need to clarify and tie these narrative approaches to a comprehensive career theory’.47 Mary McMahon and Mark Watson go as far as to claim that the

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‘literature in career psychology is generally recognized as being more theoretical than practical’.48 For example, Savickas writes of a client who had been traumatized by seeing her mother die while she was a baby. He suggests that when asking for early recollections, a counsellor should ask for three different incidents or memories so that they can be developed into a sequence. The first would identify and define the main preoccupation of the client; the second repeats or elaborates that central preoccupation; and the third seeks a potential solution through the implementation of new decisions. He refers to this method as ‘story sequence analysis’ and it is the approximate method for generating a career life story.49 Analysis of that client’s story sequence led her to choose a profession as a hospice carer, because each time she helped someone die well, she healed her own trauma a little more.50 Three other case studies are sufficient to illustrate the general principle of the narrative method. Richard Young and José Domene record the case of Maria, a nineteen-​year-​old college student struggling to reconcile her ‘fun’ side (defined in her case by flirtation and sexual experimentation) with her ‘serious’ side (defined by college work and attempts to choose a career).51 Earlier forms of career counselling would have focused only (or primarily) on the latter consideration, whereas career construction is a way of thinking about careers that enables the consideration of apparently non-​career related aspects of her emotional and social life as well as her overt work choices. Peter McIlveen’s case study of a forty-​year-​old banker who suffered months of depression after being passed over for promotion uses the narrative method (as opposed to aptitude tests or career databases) to explore the options available to that person, and again reveal that the depression itself was not solely the result of professional frustration, so simply choosing another job would not be the solution.52 Polly Parker’s example of Stella, a female administrative worker for an Australian mining company, has a similar tendency, again using storytelling and dialogue to explore the underlying causes of workplace animosity that might not on the surface be related to her professional life but which turn out to play a partly determining role in them. Again, moving to another employer is not the only answer because it would not address the fundamental question of what Stella valued most in her life.53 Maree explains that choices are often ‘intrinsically flawed from the outset because of inadequately trained counsellors and/​or because of inadequate information about the clients and their autobiographies and main life themes, their attributes, their developmental levels, their self-​concept and the requirements of the world of work’.54 Cochran puts it more succinctly when he says ‘solving a problem the person did not have is a strange sort of activity’.55

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The Late-Career Novelist

Meta-​consciousness and Meta-​reflection Rather than using a prescriptive method to impose a particular conclusion on its subjects, career construction opens up a process by which subjects create their own conclusions dialogically. For this reason, Savickas argues that ‘[i]‌ntentionality has replaced decidedness as a pivotal construct’ when compared to earlier forms of vocational guidance.56 Since Maree defines intentionality as ‘the intention to make meaning’,57 intentionality is the precondition for the deep levels of self-​reflection that are elucidated in career counselling. Or as Savickas explains:  ‘Individuals construct a self by reflecting on experience using the uniquely human capacity to be conscious of consciousness. Self-​consciousness, or awareness of awareness, requires language.’58 Career construction (unlike other career-​based methodologies) does not see language as purely representational of a given set of affairs, relationships or situation. Rather, by creating new words and concepts clients create a new level of cognition and generate deeper insight into the dynamics of that situation, the better to be able to change it. Someone’s capacity not only for an informed, intelligent consciousness but also to be critically conscious of how that consciousness was formed elevates the construction of the self above the superficial level and onto a meta-​cognitive plane. Clients in career counselling do not only seek an external solution to one or more career problems. They must first define for themselves what constitutes a problem, what actions are available to them in response to it, and what must meaningfully have changed before the problem can be considered resolved. They must then evaluate the different actions comparatively by gauging the efficacy of each in achieving that altered state. Career construction is not merely a matter of making a decision, or even of reflecting on it, but of interrogating the basis on which decisions are made at the meta-​ reflective level. The difference between reflection and what Maree terms ‘meta-​ reflection’ is thus the difference between reflecting on a given action that has already been completed, and reflecting for a future action.59 Hazel Reid and Barbara Bassot point out that this reflective cycle also needs to be applied by the counsellors themselves as they continually interrogate, refine and renew their own practice.60 Clients at the start of career counselling are likely to possess such self-​ criticality in low degrees. Savickas observes that in responding to the questions about past recollections with which he starts a career interview, clients often initially focus on the factual content of their answers, with little or no critical self-​reflection. He reports that clients are frequently unsure of the

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Introduction

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purpose of the questions themselves, because they are focused almost exclusively on present problems and future solutions rather than on past behaviours. This excessive factuality militates against a high level of self-​awareness or self-​ examination. The point is that the factual content of the early recollections is far less important than the attributes clients associate with those recollections, but they will not immediately apprehend this: ‘clients do not at first realize that they are conceptualizing their own selves’.61 The aim of using story sequence analysis to build up a life story is that it enables people to ‘listen to their own lives speak and, in due course, see themselves in their stories’.62 In this way, the narrative method implies a doubling of the consciousness of the person receiving counselling. Related to this doubling, Cochran takes a different approach to the concept of the self, questioning whether the client has ever possessed a prior, inert sense of self that can be re-​affirmed in moments of troubling change. To Cochran, each narrative that the counsellor co-​creates with the client has built into it a representation of that person’s future that can be lived out in a meaningful way. Developing a future-​orientated chapter in the life story is possible only if the client can make a distinction between ‘ideal’ narratives on the one hand and both ‘actual’ and ‘possible’ narratives on the other.63 Enabling the individual to make a successful transition from an existing state of affairs with which he or she is dissatisfied is obviously the purpose of career counselling, but it requires that the potential destination is itself possible: not everyone can do everything. Thus the possible next chapter of a person’s life story may be an ideal conclusion to that story so far, or it may be a meaningful compromise between the ideal and the currently possible. As Cochran explains: These states of affairs can be taken as hypothetical beginnings and ends of the larger story of life that define the quest. In the middle, the person strives, develops skills, forges a habit, becomes discouraged, tries other routes, achieves a new status, elaborates what a personal heaven and hell are, and so on … sometimes there is not just one character the person inhabits, but two irreconcilable (or so it seems to the person) ways of being.64

Forgiving Cochran’s use of a mixed metaphor that likens a lifetime to both a story and a quest, his idea of the distinction between actual and ideal/​possible narratives has three important considerations. First of all, it implies not just the doubling of consciousness described above (between narrator and listener), but also a more complex tripling of that consciousness. That is, the individual in question narrates his life story, is his own first listener and by converting what he

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The Late-Career Novelist

hears into potential action becomes also the main protagonist in future chapters of that story. To put it another way, the life story becomes effective for the individual first by narrating it, then by listening to it and finally by acting upon it. Second, the concepts of a ‘personal heaven’ and a ‘personal hell’ are important because they fundamentally change the basis of the evaluative process. In short, this means that the definition of success or satisfaction varies significantly from person to person. Since the person in question has always to generate his or her own definitions of actual and ideal, the earlier mechanistic approach to career counselling is unlikely to be able to articulate true complexity. This means that individual conceptions of heaven and hell can only ever be partial and provisional, arrived at and clarified through the dialogue involved in the narrative method itself. Third, and related to the contingent and individual specificity of how to appraise heaven and hell, it is important to emphasize that these things are not static even for a given individual. They are apt to evolve and develop over time, often in a dialectical relationship with each other. What constitutes success, satisfaction or simply good work in one stage of that person’s career will not necessarily constitute success or satisfaction in another and in fact is very unlikely to do so in the postmodern economy that Savickas describes, where a total career is likely to involve several alternate and radically different roles. Even in cases where the role, or at least the general area of work remains the same, personal conceptions of heaven or hell are likely to undergo modification during the long course of a career as other, extraneous factors such as familial relationships are brought to bear on a qualitative assessment of it. Because it is dynamic and flexible, career construction is more adept at reconciling those factors of the life with more apparent components of the career itself than other forms of career counselling. To consider further how the definitions of individual heaven and hell are both specific to an individual and variable across that person’s total career, it is necessary to conceptualize the different stages of the career.

Micro-​narratives and career stages In career construction, the stories a person tells about one-​off or isolated incidents in his or her working life are referred to as micro-​narratives. A macro-​ narrative, by contrast, is a wider narrative into which the individual assimilates all of the separate micro-​narratives even though they might tell of incidents that

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Introduction

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occurred at different life and/​or career stages.65 To put this another way, a micro-​ narrative is not in itself a career stage as such, but is the subjective expression and initial evaluation of what a person does in a given stage. The micro-​narrative may only be the narrative of an individual incident such as a workplace confrontation, the missing of an important target or a sudden change of duties during an overall career stage lasting four or five years. Nevertheless it is of symbolic importance because it is likely to express a range of different frustrations, anxieties, hopes, fears and, above all, a desire for change. All of these are different potential factors in a person’s self-​evaluation of his life and work over time. In other words, although the impulse for identifying them comes through a one-​ off incident, the factors themselves are likely to be associated with the role he is undertaking and the whole period of time for which he has been performing it. In many cases, the micro-​narrative therefore generates both clarity and momentum and is likely to lead to the opening of a new career stage through decisive change. One of the most important implications of this discovery is that in many cases career stages are only identifiable in retrospect rather than in the day-​to-​day experience of the tasks performed during each stage. More significant, however, is a shift in the definition of a career stage itself. For example, one of the techniques commonly used in earlier forms of career counselling was the so-​called ‘lifelines’ in which the person seeking counselling draws up a timeline of their professional life so far, highlighting major achievements and setting goals for the passing of future milestones within specific periods of time.66 An important assumption of career construction is that a data-​led approach of this kind is not necessarily of no value in the counselling relationship, but it is incomplete when life stories are developed through a synthesis of surface quantitative data with deep, rich and complicating qualitative factors. This means that career stages are not defined solely by factual elements such as the periods of time allotted for the achievement of certain goals, and career success cannot be reckoned simply by ascertaining whether or not those goals have been achieved within those periods. As Cochran puts it: [A]‌person might be a member of a meditation group in one period and a doctoral student in physics in the next period. Certainly, some qualities of the person endure across such contrasting periods, but mere endurance is not the point. The point is significance, and significance is judged by the role in a larger composition such as character or story. Even elements that appear to be discrepant can cohere if placed as parts of a superordinate.67

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When a person’s ‘career’ is reconciled to his ‘life’ more generally, he is likely to see that he already occupies not only several different roles but also several different kinds of roles. Indeed, Cochran’s thinking could be extended even further once we realize that membership of a meditation group and undertaking doctoral research are not necessarily mutually exclusive and need not be seen as successive stages because the same individual can fulfil them both during the same period. An approach to career stages based on the portioning out of discrete periods of time is likely to be misleading and ineffective in thinking about how a career is constructed overall. Career stages are therefore defined less as intervals of time than as collections of relationships plus the ascription of value. Moreover, Savickas suggests that clients in career counselling should not take an instrumental view of the different stages. That is, if they undertake a particular task or role for a period of time merely as a means to a different and presumably deferred end, they are likely to end up registering profound dissatisfaction and unhappiness both with the short-​term activity and the long-​term end. Only when this ‘impasse’ is identified as such can individual sources of value and meaning be elucidated in dialogue and the client has the opportunity to engage in cognate meaningful activity as an end in its own right, rather than merely as a means to a new end.68 When this is achieved, a new career stage is opened. This in turn creates the opportunity to engage in new activity corresponding to the new career stage, and to open up what Cochran calls the ‘internal goods’ of that activity.69 By ‘goods’ Cochran appears to mean those aspects or characteristics of an activity, role, job or relationship to which a person attaches most value and which therefore are likely to provide the deepest sense of satisfaction to that person. It might be money, seniority, respect, imaginative stimulation or a combination of different factors. Cochran’s examples are stone masonry, writing and retail, which each offer different kinds of ‘goods’ to the individuals who profess them. ‘Writing might become interesting when the right image appears, an apt expression crystallizes or new ideas are generated. Entrepreneurship might become interesting when a market clarifies, the business begins to progress, or a management strategy begins to pay off.’70 A rich evaluation of career stages recognizes that success is a contingent concept, subject to many different kinds of definitions, which can therefore only ever be partial, provisional and locally specific to the individual in question. This means that the stages themselves are not bounded periods of time but are meaningful components of a career that the person constructs for him or herself when he or she begins to ascribe particular meaning and value to specific

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Introduction

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activities. The stages are not instrumental, but are arrived at through meta-​ reflection on why the person has committed himself to the path that he has chosen. Finally, the qualitative worth of each of the stages cannot be arrived at through reference to an extrinsic or normative definition of success since there is no objective standard. The different ways by which a person might measure career satisfaction have also to be constructed by the individual in question for himself and can be revised as his qualitative desires change. In other words, the criteria for defining a successful career are specific to the particular person who constructs them at the particular career stage at which they are constructed. They are also subject to an open-​ended process of re-​ evaluation and modification so that the success of each career stage can only be evaluated on its own (contingent) terms.

Life themes The new way of thinking about career stages proposed by career construction practitioners requires a new way of thinking about the relationship between different stages. If the stages are no longer temporally defined, and need not be successive, a weak relationship such as before/​after or even cause-​and-​effect becomes inadequate for such thinking. Peter McIlveen and Wendy Patton therefore propose to conceptualize the relationship between different stages by making a distinction between the ‘objective’ career and ‘subjective’ expressions of it.71 They define the ‘objective’ career as a factual list or at best a sequence of the different roles an individual has performed, whereas understanding the ‘subjective’ career requires generating a narrative that provides continuity between those roles even where they are apparently disparate and unconnected. To illustrate the distinction, Savickas uses the metaphor of a museum curator, who doesn’t only assemble a list of works of art, but also arranges them into some kind of coherent exhibition, where the coherence is generated through narrative.72 To put it another way, the objective career would be no more than a list of a person’s different micro-​narratives in isolation from each other. A  macro-​ narrative assimilates them into a whole story. This whole story articulates not only raw data but also emotional and cognitive evaluation and hence constitutes a subjective career narrative. Over the coming chapters it will be suggested that the different works (or related sets of works) by a given artist might be seen as discrete portions of the artist’s objective career, which might imply that they

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correspond to a series of temporally defined periods or stages within that career. However, when the notion of the objective career is replaced with that of the subjective career, a different narrative emerges, avoiding the reduction of career stages to mere stretches of time, and expressing the different qualitative values constructed during each. Given that the criteria for defining success is prone to modification over time, this distinction has significant implications for how we judge works produced in different stages. The continuity suggested by analysis of a person’s career macro-​narrative is often not obviously a form of continuity as such; indeed in many cases the goal of career counselling is to extrapolate and retrospectively reconstruct it from a barely latent to a coherent, comprehensible form. For example, in Career Counseling Savickas writes of the case of Raymond, a biology student who was so depressed by the science building at his university campus that he was unable to enter it and was in danger of falling behind with his studies. Career counselling revealed that he had only chosen to study biology as a result of parental pressure, and that in the family environment Raymond struggled to make his own voice heard. He confided to the counsellor that he wanted to be a creative writer and hence had to change subjects and direction. The counsellor had no difficulty in reconciling this goal with the client’s self-​imagination, as writing would clearly have been a more effective way for Raymond to get his voice heard. On the other hand, the counselling sessions also revealed that being a ‘quitter’ was not part of Raymond’s self-​image. This contradiction could only be resolved in dialogue with the counsellor when the student came to realize that if he did not pursue the idea of writing, he would be guilty of giving up his own vocation. Thus continuing with the biology degree would have been a form of quitting, whereas the surface act of ‘quitting’ the course would enable Raymond’s action to be assimilated to a chosen path and hence express a deeper and less obvious continuity. The goal of career counselling is to enable clients to come to such a degree of self-​awareness and self-​realization, even in cases where the insight developed is not manifest from the outset and may appear illogical or even contradictory: ‘So empowered, they begin to write a new chapter in their life stories, narratives that extend an occupational plot with a meaningful career theme.’73 Career counselling provides a means of developing a narrative of the self that is capable of articulating these disparate elements, mainly through identification of one or more primary life themes. The career theme, as Savickas defines it, is the controlling idea that provides the primary unit of meaning for understanding the occupational plot within a career trajectory. When individuals face challenges –​which is often the reason for seeking career counselling –​the career

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theme is the focal point around which coheres the recurrent pattern by which the macro-​narrative provides order and overarching goals and hence makes sense of the discrete micro-​narratives, or career portions:  ‘The career theme provides a unifying idea that, through reoccurrence, makes a life whole. As individuals incorporate new experiences, they use the implicit theme to comprehend the plot episodes by imposing the pattern of meaning on them.’74 In other words, career theme is the glue that holds the micro-​narratives together within an overarching macro-​narrative at the metatextual level. Cochran goes as far as to refer to the macro-​narrative as a ‘life history’ because it allows for this ‘unifying tendency’ between life elements that are otherwise not fully reconciled to each other at some transcendent level.75 He notes also that often the counsellor has to be quite active in eliciting the life theme from the client without allowing it to be distorted, neglected or exaggerated, and is hence a ‘co-​constructor of meaning’ along with the client.76 Different micro-​narratives can be organized into a life history via the identification of life themes. When this is done in narrative, the counsellor mobilizes two different temporal structures, one synchronic and one diachronic. In other words, career portions that appear discrete and self-​contained on the one hand are rendered porous and still discernible across time and across different life stages and career phases on the other. The parallel rendering of these two different ways of figuring the chronological linkages across different career stages enables a reconceptualization of each of them in relation to the others. The point is not so much that the boundaries between each phase become blurred; but that each phase having ended can be evaluated both according to the provisional, qualitative criteria by which it was constructed on the one hand; and in relation to the other stages and to the career trajectory as a whole, on the other. The use of this dual temporality in career counselling tells us two different things. First, as we have seen, each stage is constructed in a way that is particular to itself and cannot be generalized. Second, even after the specifics of each phase have been identified and evaluated, there remains an overall continuity within the person’s narrative of self. This continuity is provided by the elaboration of an overall life or career theme. However, Savickas explains, it is important to understand that the identification and repetition of a life theme is not a matter of uncovering pre-​existing facts; rather it is about creating signification and hence meaning, even in cases where this involves the generation of new meaning for past events: A narrative truth may not be an accurate report of fixed facts because the theme repeatedly re-​members –​that is, reinterprets and reconstructs –​the past to meet the needs of the next scenario. The theme functions to carry trends from the past

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The Late-Career Novelist steadily forward through the present and into the future. Thus, autobiographical reasoning uses the theme to choose, organize, and present an identity narrative with contemporary meaning and usefulness.77

Here is an instance of why career construction provides a potential conceptual framework for analysing an authorial career in general, and the late (or retrospective) stage of that career more specifically. The challenge for an author at the retrospective stage is how to go on being the author of the works for which he or she has become known while also creating not only new works but also fundamentally new kinds of works. Savickas expresses this problem as the question of how individuals address and conceptualize their dual apprehension of sameness and difference across time. This conceptualization is made possible not by factual recovery of past and present roles, but by narrative interpretation of them. As the coming chapters will demonstrate, one of the means by which authors at the retrospective stage of their career signal this interplay is by inserting into the work produced during that stage a character who is a storyteller or narrator figure. This enables them to put the author back into the work that was already there, and thereby express their meta-​reflection on their own role as artists.

Career construction and/​as theories of authorship Throughout Career Counseling, and in the work of a number of other career construction practitioners such as Peter McIlveen, Wendy Patton, Kobus Maree and Larry Cochran, the concept of individual clients authoring  –​or in some cases co-authoring alongside the counsellor  –​a new chapter in the narrative of their own professional development has the status of an extended and controlling metaphor. The preponderance in the field of this emphasis on the narrativization of life themes is one of the main departures made by career construction theory from other, more traditional ways of defining career stages in theory:  ‘Practitioners apply career construction theory when they perform career counselling to (a) construct career through small stories, (b) deconstruct and reconstruct the small stories into a large story, and (c) coconstruct the next episode in the story.’78 Unlike the field of psychoanalysis to which it is related, career construction has not previously been brought to bear on the domain of literary research. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson note that Irwin Berg suggested as early as 1954 that ‘trait theory’ and psychoanalysis were both subfields of social psychology which provided potential ways of conceptualizing how cognitive and

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psychic processes work, but that unlike psychoanalysis, trait theory had not received sufficient attention outside its own realm.79 Trait theory, as we have seen, was an earlier component of career education and in fact its recognition as such was a key factor in the widening of the scope of vocational guidance, which accelerated after 1997 when Cochran developed the methods of career constructivism. Career construction theory, in other words, has lagged behind psychoanalysis in being applied to literary study. This is partly for a reason explored above:  that approaching an authorial career as one of the material conditions in which textual production occurs is itself a relatively new development in literary research. The high status in career construction theory of metaphors of storytelling, writing and authorship suggests a potentially fertile but hitherto unexplored area of connection between career counselling and contemporary literary analysis. This is because theorists like Savickas not only employ the concept of authorship as a metaphor in their work but also draw on many of the key insights of literary theory for helping their clients reimagine themselves in new roles. The present study proposes to perform a complementary gesture: redeploy the insights of career construction in the literary domain. Whereas authorship is posed as a guiding metaphor for the creation of new possibilities within the sphere of career construction theory, the question implicitly to be asked throughout these pages is: how can that theoretical work be applied to an individual whose career is (already) that of an author? In other words, the paradigm that renders authorship metaphorical in career construction theory will here be rendered literal rather than abstract, while retaining the emphasis in that theoretical work on dialogism, an unfolding sense of self and critical self-​reflection. Indeed, the notion of self-​reflexivity in the work associated with one career stage with regard to the work produced during an earlier stage will be developed throughout this book to explore the notion of self-​reflection as a specific kind of metafiction peculiar to literary work produced during the retrospective stages of an author’s career. There are four main reasons why career construction theory can fruitfully be used to analyse authorial careers in a new and innovative way. First, the repeated emphasis on storytelling and re-​narration made in career construction theory implies an important convergence between authorship as a literary practice and authorship as a constructivist theory when the switch is made from the metaphoric to the literal. Second, the implication of counsellor and client as co-​creators of a joint narrative chimes in with more recent literary theory, which has increasingly de-​romanticized the notion of the author as a solitary

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genius, and replaced it with a sense of the author as existing in a web of different collaborative relationships that, taken together, enable literary creation. Third, the theoretical model provides a paradigm for identifying the different stages that compose an overall career, where stages are defined in the provisional, self-​ generated and atemporal sense outlined above. And finally, career construction theory offers a potential –​and provisional –​resolution to a central problem of late-​career authorship: namely, the problem of a given author’s non self-​identity in different works over time. It will be argued here that career construction theory offers to resolve this problem dialectically by proposing that different expressions of an authorial self become manifest at different points within the overall trajectory of the career. As we have seen, the metaphor of authorship that dominates Savickas’s thinking is also rendered literal in career counselling because it requires its clients to see themselves as both authors and agents performing different roles. In the case of an individual whose career is that of an author, it is rendered most literal of all because the micro-​narratives of each career stage, the different roles performed in each stage, are tantamount to the role of author of each previous literary work. This role must be maintained even while it is systematically dismantled so that the role of author of the next work can be assembled in its place. The continuity between micro-​narratives or career stages is typically expressed in literary terms as the ongoing portrayal of recurring themes or individual forms for the expression of those themes. These can then only ever be identified and expressed retrospectively within the narrative interpretation provided by a macro-​narrative, emphasizing not only factual consistency but also ascription of narrative value. In other words, the interplay between synchronic micro-​narratives and diachronic macro-​narrative lifts works produced during the late-​career stage into a metatextual orbit, in which they circulate in the full knowledge of the existence of the earlier work and whose existence they must come to terms with in their own way. The use of the narrative technique in career counselling is effective because the life stories developed can be used to cultivate a bond of identification linking the client’s past self to his or her future roles. This means of articulating variation within sameness through a retrospective narrative mode is of course what authors themselves do at the retrospective stage of their career. There is, however, one important difference, which is that clients of career counselling have normally suffered some dynamic or turbulent rupture whereby ‘[t]‌he imminent end of a previous adaptation dislocates clients from a life space and occupational

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plot’ causing them to experience a sense of ‘disequilibrium’ which ‘moves them to consult a practitioner’.80 ‘Disequilibrium’ as a starting point is itself a highly literary concept, but a person who has successfully achieved a career as author will not necessarily experience a traumatic dislocation from his or her vocation in the same way and is therefore unlikely to register the experience of disequilibrium as such. The type of challenge experienced by the author at the retrospective stage of his career is not clearly visible on the surface and has to be reconciled by looking deeper into the life story. The particular ‘problem’ for an author at the retrospective stage is of a dialectical nature because the challenge is not so much how they adjust to an experience of trauma but the opposite: how they go on being creative and innovative after they have become known for having achieved certain successful kinds of works in a certain characteristic style. In other words, the challenge posed by a change within an authorial career is not so much how to become an author, as how to become a different kind of author while also retaining an association with the works one has already authored. ‘The challenge of dislocation may be seen as unwanted and unwarranted, or it may be seen as an opportunity to reconstruct the life and start a new story line. Either way, narrative identity work involves an active effort to acknowledge and analyse the impact of a novel experience or a troubling social expectation.’81 Once this stage of an authorial career has been reached, the authorial signature lays down certain expectations for what the next work by that author should be like, at both the thematic and the formal level. Those expectations in turn might limit the capacity or otherwise for authorial renewal and newly invigorated kinds of creativity. Or as Tereza Pavlíčková puts it, audiences ‘evaluate’ authors based on ‘the latter’s ability to meet the audience’s/​readers’ expectations and conform to the expected, pre-​existing norms and standards’.82 It is a working assumption of this book that those expectations and norms are partly constituted in the mind of the reader by his or her knowledge of the author’s prior output. This degree of knowledge of course is greater or lesser in each case. However, my concern here is not so much to reconstruct the exact reading practices of real-​world readers as it is to think about how the author uses the theoretically postulated figure of the reader as a kind of mirror of himself. That is, the notion of the reader creates an opportunity for the author to look at himself from an imagined standpoint outside himself and in doing so, to think about his next move as an author. In the chapters that follow, career construction will be developed as a new theory of authorship capable of elucidating the different stages of an authorial

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career and hence what is specific to fictions of self-​retrospect. This extrapolation will be made possible by addressing a number of theoretical questions: ¬¬

¬¬

¬¬

¬¬

¬¬

What is the relationship between an author’s earlier work and later output? Is it appropriate to judge work produced in different career stages by the same criteria? Is it possible to take into account the existence of the earlier works when judging the quality of the later in a way that avoids judging the later works as merely inferior or less innovative versions of what has come before? How would it be possible to alter the criteria by which we make such judgements so as to make possible a more positive evaluation of late-​career fictions? If the criteria identified above were altered, how would our understanding of that work also change?

Just as the biology student quit in order to avoid being a quitter, so too an author must recognize one or more prior achievements as a curious kind of problem and articulate a new and critically reflective response to it. Career construction theory offers a partial resolution to this dilemma because the central preoccupation of career counselling is to account for an individual’s non self-​identity with other versions of that self by creating a narrative continuity between the different career roles and career stages that comprise a single overall career. The application of career construction theory to literary analysis will contribute to the development of three primary arguments: First, that the kinds of works produced by an author during the retrospective stage are necessarily different from the earlier and mid-​career works. Second, that for this reason, the kinds of criteria we apply when judging the quality of such works should be different from those that we apply to the early/​mid-​career works precisely because our consideration of the later has to take into account the prior existence of the earlier. Third, that work produced during the late period in an author’s career is often profoundly metafictive because it reveals authors returning to the themes and forms they had used in the work for which they are best known and self-​ consciously attempting to write about them again, as if for the first time.

Notes 1 See Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); G. Douglas Atkins, Strategy and Purpose in T. S.

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Introduction

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Eliot’s Major Poems (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2015) and Kate Aughterson, Shakespeare: The Late Plays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2 The question of how to define the theoretically impossible notion of contemporaneity is the subject of Giorgio Agamben’s essay, ‘What is the Contemporary?’ See his ‘What is an Apparatus?’ and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 39–​54. 3 A further theoretical investigation into the idea of the vanishing contemporary in art is provided by Jean-​Luc Nancy, ‘Art Today’, Journal of Visual Culture, 9 (1), 2010, pp. 91–​99. 4 David Galenson, Artistic Capital (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 171–​72. 5 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 236. 6 Said, Beginnings, p. 255. 7 Mohebat Ahmadi, ‘The Death or the Revivals of the Author?’, Theory & Practice in Language Studies, 2 (12), 2012, p. 2672. 8 Said, Beginnings, p. 227. 9 Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans (eds), Literary Careers in the Modern Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 3. 10 Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 107. 11 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 9. 12 Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat, trans. Eric Selland (London: Picador, 2014), p. 58. 13 Hiraide, The Guest Cat, p. 33. 14 Haruki Murakami, What I Talk about When I talk about Running, trans. Philip Gabriel (London: Vintage: 2008), p. 78. 15 Ibid., p. 33. 16 Ibid., p. 10. 17 Ibid. 18 Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 136. 19 Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins, ‘Writing Now’, in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970–​Present. Volume Ten, ed. Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 254. 20 David Smit, Language of a Master: Theories of Style and the Late Writings of Henry James (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 2. 21 F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 30. 22 Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), p. 5.

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23 Margaret Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 24 Kathleen Woodward, Figuring Age: Women, Generations, Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 25 Laslett, Fresh Map, p. 5. 26 Jenny Hockey and Allison James, ‘Back to Our Futures: Imaging Second Childhood’, in Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 146. 27 Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 28 Davidson and Evans, Literary Careers in the Modern Era, p. 3. 29 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 257. 30 Ibid., p. 268. 31 Ibid., pp. 126–​34. 32 Ibid., p. 128. Emphasis in original. 33 Ibid., p. 129. 34 Ibid., p. 150. 35 Ibid. 36 Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 15. 37 See, for example, Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (eds), Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Davidson and Evans suggest that an important earlier example was Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 38 Mark Savickas, ‘Career Counselling in the Postmodern Era’, Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 7 (3), 1993, pp. 205–​15. 39 Stephen Katz, ‘Imagining the Life-​Span: From Predmodern Miracles to Postmodern Fantasies’, in Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 68. 40 Mary McMahon and Mark B. Watson (eds), Career Counseling and Constructivism: Elaboration of Constructs (New York: Nova Science, 2011), p. 3. 41 Kobus (writing as Jacobus) Maree, Counselling for Career Construction: Connecting Life Themes to Construct Life Portraits: Turning Pain into Hope (Rotterdam: Sense, 2013), p. 17. 42 Mark Savickas, Career Counseling (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2011), p. 8. 43 Larry Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), p. 22. 44 Cochran, Career Counseling, p. 49. 45 Ibid., p. 57.

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46 Ibid., p. 58. 47 Jennifer Del Corso and Mark C. Rehfuss, ‘The Role of Narrative in Career Construction Theory’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79 (2011), p. 334. 48 McMahon and Watson, Career Counseling and Constructivism: Elaboration of Constructs, p. 2. 49 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 79. 50 Ibid. 51 Richard A. Young and José F. Domene, ‘The Construction of Agency in Career Counselling’, in Career Counseling and Constructivism, ed. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson, p. 33. 52 Peter McIlveen, ‘Life Themes in Career Counselling’, in Career Counseling and Constructivism, ed. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson, p. 80. 53 Polly Parker, ‘Quality Career Assessment’, in Career Counseling and Constructivism, ed. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson, p. 138. 54 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 42. 55 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 41. 56 Savickas ‘Foreword’, in Career Counseling and Constructivism, ed. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson, p. x. 57 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 53. 58 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 15. 59 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 7. 60 Hazel L. Reid and Barbara Bassot, ‘Reflection: A Constructive Space for Career Development’, in Career Counseling and Constructivism, ed. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson, p. 106. 61 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 57. 62 Ibid., p. 45. 63 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 13. 64 Ibid., p. 71. 65 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 22. 66 Polly Parker, ‘Quality Career Assessment’, p. 136. 67 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 71. 68 Mark Savickas, ‘Constructing Careers: Actor, Agent, and Author’, Journal of Employment Counseling, 48 (4), 2011, p. 179. 69 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 143. 70 Ibid. 71 Peter McIlveen and Wendy Patton, ‘Dialogical Self: Author and Narrator of Career Life Themes’, International Journal for Educational & Vocational Guidance, 7 (2), 2007, p. 73. 72 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 68. 73 Ibid., p. 147.

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74 Ibid., p. 26. 75 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 61. 76 Ibid., p. 64. 77 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 35. 78 Ibid., p. 5. 79 McMahon and Watson, Career Counseling and Constructivism, p. 146. 80 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 43. 81 Ibid., p. 21. 82 Tereza Pavlíčková, ‘Bringing the Author Back into the Audience Research: A Hermeneutical Perspective on the Audience’s Understanding of the Author’, Communication Review, 16 (1/​2), 2013, p. 37.

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2

The Dialogic Self and the Vocation of the Storyteller

This chapter will expand on one of the key arguments raised in the Introduction: that career construction theory provides a useful set of resources for enhancing our understanding of the different stages in an authorial career and for identifying some of the specific characteristics of works produced at the retrospective stage. The chapter will supplement Mark Savickas’s idea of the micro-​narrative with the work of two other practitioners of career construction counselling: Peter McIlveen and Wendy Patton’s more nuanced concept of the dialogic self and their taxonomy of four different levels of life themes. As practising career counsellors, the concern of Savickas, McIlveen and Patton is to find ways of enabling clients to consider a series of alternative career directions and imagine themselves following those directions through the critical negotiation of potential barriers and obstacles. The utility of the metaphor of authorship they persistently use is to suggest that the individuals capable of creating a number of potentially different life stories are capable of imagining themselves occupying a number of different relationships and hence of taking new directions in their lives. By contrast, subjects less able to write such a diversity of life stories are less likely to be able to take this step. In effect, this chapter picks up the question raised in the Introduction: how are these possibilities instantiated in the different kinds of works produced at different stages during the career of an empirical (as opposed to metaphorical) author? It will create a provisional answer to this question by using Wayne C. Booth’s idea of the ‘implied author’ to situate Graham Swift’s recent novel Wish You Were Here (2011) in the trajectory of his career more generally. Tom Kindt and Hans-​Harald Müller have recently reconstructed the American institutional and historical context in which Booth developed the concept of the implied author in the 1950s and 1960s, and some of the reasons why it was eclipsed by the then-​dominant practice of New Criticism. Kindt and Müller argue that the

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‘terminological fuzziness’ with which Booth originally used the term gives rise to a frustrating lack of clear definition on the one hand, but also to an opportunity for critical reappraisal and reapplication of the concept on the other.1 Such reapplication is possible, they suggest, because the field of authorship research is not so specialized as to be impossible to mobilize in different spheres. They contrast this relative freedom from technical procedures with the more specialized field of psychoanalysis, which, of all the human sciences, has been the most commonly drawn upon in literary research to date. In other words, drawing on Kindt and Müller’s suggestion that the implied author is a concept ripe for renewal lends weight to the overall argument of this book  –​that career constructivism is a branch of social sciences that has tended to be underutilized in literary study. That is not to say that Booth’s ideas will be used uncritically. On the contrary, I will expand on the ideas of Booth’s former doctoral student Peter Rabinowitz to develop the notion of the ‘implied author’ in a particular way. Rabinowitz’s key insight in Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (1987) is that how readers read and interpret a given text is a process that involves the activation of a whole range of contextual, social and cultural knowledge, including knowledge of a given author’s own earlier work. His notion of the ‘authorial audience’ is a construct that conceptualizes the theoretical reader a given author might be writing for, as distinct from any specific empirical readers in the material world. That is, Booth’s argument about the existence of the ‘implied author’ is that the reader builds up a theoretical impression of the author during the process of reading. Rabinowitz’s ‘authorial audience’ advances this argument a stage by suggesting that the author too conceptualizes the kind of reader he is writing for. I intend to advance it a stage further by arguing that the ‘authorial audience’ includes the author’s impression of the reader’s impression of himself. Thinking about how the author imagines the reader in this way is not a matter of reconstructing authorial intention at the pragmatic level, but of positing an idea of the reader that is accessible to the author as a way of thinking about himself as such. It opens up a dialogue between a particular micro-​ narrative in a given career and an overall life theme in the career as a whole, offering a combination of continuity across apparent variation. Thus I  will argue that Swift’s Wish You Were Here (2011) is an example of the creation of a new career theme at the micro-​level of storytelling: that is, the level at which the author creates a new narrative through an imaginative engagement with his other dialogic selves.

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The Dialogic Self and the Vocation of the Storyteller

39

The dialogical self When theories about the construction of the self are evaluated, there is a significant difference between the approaches of constructionism and constructivism. Constructionism posits a person’s sense of reality as the product of external relationships and hence socially created. Constructivism suggests that a person’s apprehension of exterior reality is created psychologically at the intra-​individual level. Maree identifies a frustrating tendency among practitioners of career construction to use these terms interchangeably, which may be one of the obstacles preventing the field from being used in humanities research until now.2 It should be clear from the Introduction, however, that the principal components of career construction theory are the narrative method; the element of meta-​reflection; and the interplay between micro-​narratives and transcendent life themes. Of these, McIlveen and Patton suggest that the third component  –​the interplay between micro-​narratives and life themes –​has received the lowest level of critical attention.3 In an attempt to articulate the significance and potential application of the notion of life themes in a more nuanced and complex way, McIlveen and Patton have supplemented it with the concept of the dialogical self, a concept which has its roots in constructivist psychology. The concept of the dialogical self posits the realization that the self does not exist ‘in’ the mind, which is merely an organ to express it. Rather, an individual’s sense of self is generated dialogically with others in a number of different varied and changing situations. According to the constructionist (sociological) approach, a sense of self is constituted dialogically through interaction with the totality of the individuals or groups with whom one comes into contact. From a constructivist (psychological) perspective the interlocutors with whom one interacts need not be ‘real’ people and can as readily be imagined, remembered or thought-​up others or even manifestations of dreams and the unconscious yet still have an impact on how one’s sense of self is constituted. But this only occurs in an open, partial and provisional way, so that an individual’s sense of self, the ‘I’ of the self, is likely to be multiple and varied. McIlveen and Patton’s idea of a dialogical self draws on the concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony that they find in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Dostoyevsky. It supports the double movement from literature to psychology and back again that underpins career construction theory because it too has been assimilated to both spheres –​though not previously to both literary study and career construction as twin approaches to the same object of analysis: the authorial career.

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The concept of the dialogical self is an important one in career construction because it is a means of expressing the coexistence of sameness and difference over time. In analysing fictions of self-​retrospect it is necessary to elaborate a theoretical construct capable of addressing and accounting for this dialectic of (non) self-​identity over time. To put this another way, the notion of a dialogical self reinforces the emphasis on how an individual tells stories in order to become the ‘author’ of the next chapter in his career narrative, thereby reinforcing the notion of authorship as both metaphorical approximation and concrete career practice identified in the previous chapter. Applying ideas of the dialogical self generates a theoretical model for understanding careers that is neither rigidly structured nor excessively deterministic. It is a fluid model in which a career trajectory is seen as something that can change when different iterations of the dialogical self are activated. Thus: One’s dialogical self is simultaneously one’s multiply-​positioned authors, narrators, and actors; it is the creator of life themes, the teller of the stories and the enacting body. As such, the dialogical self can be conceptualized as the creator of subjective career; that notion which brings meaning [sic] the activities that go to make up the collective sum of a person’s objective career.4

Someone’s capacity to make manifest different iterations of their self in different social and experiential interactions is referred to by McIlveen and Patton as their capacity (or otherwise) to occupy a greater or lesser number of different I-​positions. An I-​position is defined as the provisional and context-​specific outward projection of an individual’s self in a given situation. This is because I-​positions are more than mere character traits, since they allow for ‘self reflection and self evaluation’.5 McIlveen and Patton developed the notion of multiply situated and dialogically authored I-​positions as a means of drawing attention to a conceptual distinction between different kinds of life stories and hence of rendering the notion of life stories more flexible and more nuanced. They express this degree of sophistication through a corresponding gradation of different levels of storytelling that articulate different kinds of narratives of self. Thus where Savickas emphasizes the distinction between micro-​ narratives and a macro-​ narrative, McIlveen and Patton propose a continuum of life themes that range from micro-​theme, through mesmo-​theme and exo-​theme, up to the larger scale macro-​theme. What they refer to as a micro-​theme in self-​narration is a means of articulating selfhood based on known and identifiable characteristics. In older forms of career education, someone’s micro-​theme would typically be matched up to

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a series of skills and environments that complement those characteristics and counselling would consist of identifying potential career roles that take place in similar environments and draw on those skills. Chapter  1 argued that this outmoded form of career education posits a static sense of self and an object-​ orientated means of conceptualizing the career trajectory which does not incorporate the possibility for critical and/​or emotional self-​reflection or for radical discontinuity and change in the expression of the self and hence in the career narrative. The notion of the dialogical self, by contrast, emphasizes that life stories are complex and multiple and consist of shifts and breaks as well as simplistic surface continuities. McIlveen and Patton use the term mesmo-​theme to conceptualize attributes of selfhood in a way that allows for a greater degree of fluidity. The dialogical self is not limited to one career, but can undergo a change in self-​conception and so create alternative career stories. In practice, this means that a career can comprise more than one mesmo-​theme. Or as they put it:  ‘As an individual moves between different I-​positions to take another authorial perspective, he or she enriches the potential for diverse stories and self-​characterizations.’6 In an authorial career, writing a new work requires the adoption of a new mesmo-​ theme and the taking up of a corresponding new I-​position. An individual who cannot imagine occupying more than one I-​position is likely to struggle to adapt to a new and different career role since ‘[t]‌he person can only become what his I-​positions can author, narrate, and act’.7 At the third level of life storytelling, the exo-​theme, the dialogical self transcends simple surface features of vocational personality altogether. A powerful life story is built up when the individual takes on multiple I-​positions and reflexively communicates with himself or herself using his or her discourses of selfhood to open up a number of different, simultaneous perspectives on the world. This means that the I-​positions in question are not only inner aspects of self such as personality or characterization but also include extrinsic material factors such as geographical location, belonging to a marginalized group, academic qualifications and so on. The exo-​theme is a narrative of self in which the individual creates an understanding of himself or herself ‘which is a meaningful compromise’ between internal and external aspects of selfhood, and between things that can be changed and those that cannot.8 Career construction theory tells us that the dialogic self uses memories and emotions to create life themes across past, present and future. One of the important recognitions that counsellors pre-​empt from their clients is the understanding that no individual seeking a change in his professional life can ever

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become literally just anything, since there is always a range of material, practical and institutional constraints. The concept of a career macro-​theme is therefore advanced to articulate the interplay between material limitation and the fluid possibility for development and change. The career macro-​theme tells us that an individual whose sense of self has been dialogically developed through interaction with a number of different discourses in the world of work will likely be able to generate several I-​positions which can generate several alternatives for his or her career. By contrast, individuals who have not occupied or been able to envisage themselves occupying a range of different I-​positions are likely to find their career aspirations more limited. For this reason, McIlveen and Patton conclude that ‘career counselling should aim to facilitate a coherent diversity of authorship and narration emanating from multiple I-​positions’.9 The notion of coherent diversity is a useful way of thinking about life stories in general, and authorial careers in particular, for a number of reasons. It is a way of expressing the troubling sense of selfhood that arises when an individual attempts to account for discontinuities in his or her sense of self over time, which is a problem redefined by McIlveen and Patton as the complex interplay between the mesmo-​thematic opportunity for change during the trajectory of a single career and an exo-​thematic series of affective limitations on what can be achieved in that career. It will be argued below that in authorial terms, this galvanizing dialectic of sameness and difference can be seen as the question of how the author of Wish You Were Here (2011) can be identified with the author of Waterland (1983) while also projecting a somewhat different authorial self. For authors at different career stages, this means that the conflict between mesmo-​ theme and exo-​theme, between continuity and innovation and between sameness and difference is constitutive of a relationship based on the simultaneous un-​and re-​making of prior versions of the authorial self. McIlveen and Patton conclude that a person’s dialogical self has the capacity to innovate through a process of position taking and dynamic repositioning. They cite the suggestion by Hermans that for a dialogue properly constitutive of a new self to occur, at least three distinct interactions are necessary:  those between an agent, a and a second agent or interlocutor, b; those back from b to a; and then from a to b again, at which point the behaviours, competences or attributes expressive of the individual sense of self will have changed.10 This triple-​layered interaction precisely describes the relationship between career construction theory and literary analysis that has been adumbrated here because so many of the controlling metaphors in career construction are drawn from literature, have been developed in both psychology and sociology and are now

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primed for reapplication in discussion of literary careers. It will also be argued below that the three stages of interaction that constitute a dialogic exchange can be mapped onto three different stages within the overall career of Graham Swift. But first it is necessary to relate the idea of the dialogic self to that of Rabinowitz’s authorial audience.

Before reading In his seminal study Before Reading:  Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (1987), Peter Rabinowitz explored the extent to which a reader’s prior knowledge and expectations of a text shape that reader’s interpretation of it. To do this he developed the notion of the ‘authorial audience’, by which he means the type of audience the writer imagines himself to be writing for. This is not so much a matter of individual intention, as in the oft-​debated territory of the intentional fallacy, but more a question of social convention. The concept of the authorial audience treats writing as a process of assembling narrative raw material into a shape that is recognizable to its readers because it draws on certain conventions, practices and even structural elements that are familiar to them and that enables them, once these recognitions are made, to join a given interpretative community: The notion of the authorial audience is clearly tied to authorial intention, but it gets around some of the problems that have traditionally hampered the discussion of intention by treating it as a matter of social convention rather than of individual psychology. In other words, my perspective allows us to treat readers’ attempt to read as the author intended, not as a search for the author’s private psyche, but rather as the joining of a particular social/​interpretive community; that is, the acceptance of the author’s invitation to read in a particular socially constituted way that is shared by the author and his or her expected readers.11

The authorial audience comprises a reader, readers or groups of readers whom the author assumes will recognize some or all of the narrative conventions he deploys and accept them as such. As a conceptual model for thinking about the process of reading, the authorial audience is necessarily distinct from one or more empirical readers. Because it is posited hypothetically rather than tested among particular material readers, it implies an approach to reader research that is not fully sociological in its method. This approach contrasts with, for example, that of Eefje Claassen who has recently brought the methods of the experimental

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human sciences to bear on reader research through rigorous statistical analysis of the responses generated by a control group of readers and a ‘target’ group. Claassen supplied members of each group with different information (sometimes invented) about the life of an author before they read passages by that author, in order to try and quantify how far knowledge of an author’s perceived moral values affects readers’ interpretation of that author’s work.12 In effect, although she does not say so, what she was doing was testing methodologically the notion of the ‘implied author’ that Booth posited in theory. One of the problems with the idea of an authorial audience is that despite the emphasis Rabinowitz puts on social convention rather than individual intention, it can slip into intentionalist confusion because it raises the question of how we know empirically what kind of audience (if any) a given author imagines himself to be writing for. Without access to this empirical information, the author too becomes a theoretical construct rather than an empirical person. This theoretical move in turn gives rise to a further distinction between the author as positioned by the text and author as imagined by the reader. In other words, the impression of the author formulated by the reader is distinct from the empirical author who sits writing the text. The argument put forward here is that the distinction between implied and empirical author is of a kind equally unresolvable as that between the authorial and actual audience. One way of thinking beyond these constructs is to consider what happens if the concept of the authorial audience has built into it a notion of what kind of author the author expects the audience to expect. To take this approach is to consider the implied author an effect of the authorial audience in a hypothetical sense. But the authorial audience itself is a hypothetical construct, the general kind of reader a given author might imagine himself writing for at any time. This means that if we see the implied author as an effect of the authorial audience, the implied author can be seen as hypothetically generated by the reader, who is also hypothetically generated by the author. To put it another way, the implied author can be seen as a second order hypothetical construct:  the author’s impression of the reader’s impression of himself. In other words, using the idea of the authorial audience is a means by which the author is able to think about himself. This way of conceptualizing the implied author would not resolve the conceptual distinctions that exist between empirical and theoretical reader or between empirical and theoretical author. However, because it moves the concept of the implied author to what Kindt and Müller refer to as a ‘metatheoretical’ level it opens the possibility of authorial self-​reflection in response to his (hypothetical) perception of the reader’s

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(hypothetical) expectation. It thus enables a metafictive practice that is typical of fictions of self-​retrospect.13 The author’s hypothetical idea of the reader’s idea of himself is a useful way of thinking about the social conventions Rabinowitz describes because it allows for the possibility that the author and the audience each have a set of expectations in mind, and that those expectations have an effect on the dual processes of writing and reading. That is, discussing Rabinowitz’s authorial audience alongside Booth’s implied author transforms both. Unlocking the capacity of the reader to the possibility of being changed by reading is one of the overall goals of the ethical criticism Booth advocated in The Company We Keep. But although Booth had already supervised Rabinowitz’s doctorate, The Company We Keep (1988) came out in the wake of Rabinowitz’s own Before Reading (1987), as Booth implicitly acknowledges through his sustained engagement with different ideas about readers. In turn, Before Reading (1987) had also more or less explicitly built on the notion of the implied author that Booth had already put forward in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961. In other words, between these three works there exists a complex interaction whereby Booth responds to Rabinowitz’s response to himself. In the unfolding critical dialogue that moves from Booth to Rabinowitz, Rabinowitz to Booth and then from Booth to Rabinowitz again there is a clear instance of the three interactions McIlveen and Patton argue are necessary for the construction of a dialogic self. The point is not merely that interaction occurs but that the sense of an author’s self evinced by the writing changes in the process of the dialogue. Booth himself comes close to acknowledging this point in that section of The Company We Keep where he classifies the different forms of ethical responsibility that exist between authors and readers and says: ‘The standard of perfecting the work enables us to say, with Jean-​Paul Sartre, that I as reader have a right to make demands on the author –​particularly the right to demand that he “demand more of me.” ’14 These demands imply a back-​and-​forth between author and reader which is the basis of extending the ‘implied author’ to include the author’s view of the reader’s view of himself. The point becomes clear once we realize that in referring to himself as reader, Booth is also simultaneously conceptualizing himself as writer since he does so in a work of which he is in fact the author. Again, this extension of the implied author concept is not a matter of empirically recording what authors say about their material readers in a factual sense. Rather, it provides a theoretical construct partly in relation to which the author begins to conceive of and re-​create himself. Meanwhile, Rabinowitz argues that narrative conventions are powerful because the capacity of the authorial audience to recognize them as

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such contributes to readers’ overall interpretations of the text. But the ‘authorial audience’ can also be defined in the new way suggested here for conceptualizing the implied author: as a theoretical means by which the author situates himself in a new way, which often means in a new work. The narrative conventions Rabinowitz describes are not static; they evolve cumulatively in the form of recognizable textual features inherited from an always-​already existing ‘intertextual grid’ and are passed on in turn to future readers and authors.15 The notion of the intertextual grid can be further conceptualized by making a pair of important distinctions. First of all, there is a significant difference between the very specialist linguistic sense in which Julia Kristeva first defined intertextuality in Desire in Language (1980)16 and its subsequent more general application to describe the relationship that exists between specific named works, especially in discussions of popular culture. Kindt and Müller suggest that the term implied author has the potential to become updated and redefined in the same way precisely because terms and concepts used in cultural studies ‘rarely’ have a ‘fixed place and classification in the binding norms of a specialist language distinct from everyday language’ so that their use is ‘not controlled by “esoteric groups of speakers” ’.17 Second, there is the question of whether the conventions that are generated intertextually give rise to interpretative expectations only on the part of the reader, or whether the author too has the capacity to consider the expectations laid down by the intertextual grid in composing the next work. Rabinowitz is more interested in the experience and expectation of the reader than of the author, but as the intertextual grid also encompasses the prior works by a given author, there is no reason to consider the author exempt from considering those prior works, and the expectations that have accumulated among his readers for his next work, during the process of writing it. This is one reason why fictions of self-​retrospect can be seen as a specific form of intertextuality. Rabinowitz gives the work of Doris Lessing as an example of this particular variant: The appropriate background group for a given text usually includes the previous works by the same author: the science fiction in Doris Lessing’s later novels stand out more sharply against the stark realism of her earlier books, just as the return to realism in The Diaries of Jane Somers is especially noticeable in the context of that science fiction.18

In this example, Rabinowitz implicitly evokes the existence of several distinct phases in the course of Lessing’s authorial career and situates discrete works within the different stages, with the characteristics of each noticeable relative to

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the others. The question this identification of stages leaves unanswered is: who is it that notices them? For Rabinowitz the answer to this question is the reader. But if the reader is thought of as a member of the authorial audience defined in the new dialogic way suggested above, the author also re-​enters the equation. The implicit identification of distinct career stages reveals the retrospective nature of authorial expectation, where this is defined as authorial expectation for reader expectation of the author. The slippage Rabinowitz makes between reader and author, masked by the passive phrase ‘is noticeable’, appears to neglect the critical question of whether social convention and interpretative expectation only operate at the level of the reader in the process of reading, or whether they are also active at the level of the author in the practice of writing. This question is answered if the notion of the authorial audience is defined through the second-​ order reflection outlined above as the typical kind of figure that might be conceived by the typical reader conceived by the author. Just as Rabinowitz treats reader expectation as a matter of theoretical convention rather than empirical investigation, so too the question of how an author might consider what kind of expectation for his work is generated among his readers by their reading of his earlier work is a question of conceptual distinction rather than biographic agency. Different possible empirical responses to this question, whether to replicate the earlier work, reproduce, swerve, complete, deviate, deny or return, will be considered more fully in subsequent chapters. Collectively, they open onto a broader question of whether or not authorial careers evince a wider sense of coherence, or whether they are disparate and fragmentary. Savickas’s insight into the shape and structure of careers in the postmodern era is that they have become fragmented and disparate in the sense that they often comprise diverse roles and micro-​narratives, but that there might be an underlying coherence in the form of a macro-​narrative. This coherence can only ever be partial and provisional because it has to be generated by each person for himself based on variable and specific interpretations of success, satisfaction and value. The concept of coherence is also important to Rabinowitz and Booth, who each argue that the critical practice of mining texts for evidence of their aesthetic and thematic coherence (or lack of it) is one of the ways in which a reader imposes his or her own ideology onto the text. The once-​dominant critical practice of using coherence as the main criterion for making value judgements, and of dismissing as inferior texts that fail to evince it, has been critiqued frequently since the publication of Before Reading. Less commonly remarked upon is the equal tendency to seek a similar sense of coherence in the overall story of an author’s career. Chapter  1 established that a conventional decline narrative,

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whereby the ‘greatness’ of canonical writers is retrospectively constructed as such through recourse to the identification of a late falling off in creativity, is a common means by which such coherence is created. Career construction theory, by contrast, makes it possible to outline a career trajectory both synchronically and diachronically, that is, both according to one overall narrative arc and as consisting of a series of several different discrete smaller arcs within that overall shape. The concept of a life theme provides a sense of continuity across apparently diverse life stages through the paradoxical interplay of sameness and difference, presence and absence. This suggests that if it is theoretically weak to expect to find coherence inhering in a given text, it is just as weak to expect to find narrative coherence in the overall career story of the author, at least in any simplistic way. Rabinowitz identifies three different ways in which coherence can be retrospectively imposed on a given text by a reader. These are the filling of ‘insufficient’ texts, in which narrative gaps, temporal breakages and unexplained shifts are amenable to reinscription by the reader; the contrary practice of sifting ‘overabundant’ texts so as to highlight what matters most in support of the interpretation being adduced; and the attempt to orientate a coherent subject position in texts that otherwise seem ‘disparate’ and where the reader needs certain rules and signposts to aid them to ‘bundle them together into convenient packages’.19 Of these three, the categories of ‘insufficient’ and ‘overabundant’ texts seem to refer to individual works, which have their coherence imposed on them through the selective manipulation of the critic. The category of ‘disparate’ texts, by contrast, seems to refer to a relationship between two or more texts that are ‘bundled’ together to cumulatively generate a relational interpretation. For this reason, the category of disparate texts can be used as a way of thinking about the relationship between texts from different phases of an authorial career and hence for considering how the authorial self engages in critical self-​reflection during the transition from one work or stage to another. In other words, a slippage between reader and author occurs when Rabinowitz discusses the imposition of coherence through the bundling together of similar sets of textual features across disparate texts: As a general rule, if a reasonable number of textual features unite it with another textual pattern, then that pattern can legitimately be treated as an appropriate “name” for the artefact in question. The more features that can be subsumed under this name, the more appropriate it is, and the more coherent the bundle is deemed to be.20

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The slippage from reader to author is quite understandable once we have made the conceptual leap of allowing implied author and authorial audience to inform each other, rather than treating them entirely separately. In Rabinowitz’s account, though, it remains unclear whether the ‘name’ of the artefact in question refers to the book, the reader, the author or the career –​each of which are involved in the activation of Foucault’s author function. Moreover, the growing area of paratextual studies has drawn attention to different kinds of titles, and how these can anticipate and pre-​empt different kinds of interpretations before a text is even read.21 As such, the act of naming should not be taken for granted, and because it implies an aspect of its own interpretation, the name in turn can stand for more than just the text to which it refers. This extra-​textual dimension becomes even more explicitly manifest when considering the ‘name’ of the author. Two of the key points to emerge from Chapter  1 were the potential identification of the different stages that comprise an author’s career, and Edward Said’s idea that during the middle stages, once the author has become known for a characteristic theme and creative idiom, his or her name ceases to refer to the empirical individual sitting at a desk typing and becomes instead a signifier capable of invoking the career of that author as a whole, thereby offering to provide a sense of continuity across it. This thematic continuity across the different texts during a single career is perhaps what Rabinowitz means when he writes ‘the very act of naming provides a sense of coherence’.22 The expectation for coherence means that the characteristic style, once known and recognized as such, is likely to create certain expectations among readers for the tone, theme, style and structure of subsequent work. That work is more likely to be judged negatively if those expectations are not met. Indeed, the typical decline narratives that were mentioned in the previous chapter are often couched in terms that explicitly compare the later work to the earlier, and find it wanting. But I have argued that the authorial audience, that is, the author’s idea of the audience, encompasses the audience’s idea of himself. This means that in picturing the kind of audience he is writing for he is also imagining himself writing for them and in a way that is theoretically responsive to them. The conventions discussed by Rabinowitz and Booth can be redefined as the expectations the reader has of the next work based on the previous and to which he partly responds. That is to say, by entering into a dialogue with his imagined reader, the author enters into a creative dialogue with his own earlier work and hence with earlier versions of his authorial self. Misreading arises if the reader feels the expectations are not met or the rules not applied, but a different judgement would arise if the rules were changed.

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Applying different critical criteria to our judgement of later works by an author enables the possibility of taking into account the relationship between it and the earlier work, as a consideration of the different career stages of Graham Swift will now show.

Graham Swift’s authorial self Perhaps the novel for which Swift is best known is Waterland (1983), a novel that has been described as ‘Swift’s masterpiece’;23 a ‘classic text’ of its period,24 and one of the leading examples of ‘historiographic metafiction’.25 This last identification is possible because of Swift’s device of a first-​person homo-​diegetic narrator who is both a schoolteacher and a storyteller. Swift puts into the mouth of his teacher, Tom Crick, a series of comments about history even while he is narrating it, thereby foregrounding the self-​conscious fictionality of the novel as such on the one hand, while thematizing and problematizing the method of telling historical tales on the other. It is partly a history of the Norfolk Fenland where Crick grew up, from the seventeenth century to the narrative present of 1980s London, and partly Crick’s personal history, encompassing a set of adolescent crises in the 1940s before marrying his sweetheart Mary and becoming a teacher. In Waterland, the different timeframes are drawn together in a way that suggests a general, but loose, causality between them. Experiences, feelings, memories and emotions encountered in the narrative present are attributed to causes that contributed to them in advance of the event, giving the overall narrative a temporal structure that is implicitly pluperfect. Mary and Tom have grown up childless because the young Mary had gone to Martha Clay for a covert abortion. Years later Mary is driven to kidnap a child in a supermarket because of the emotional disturbance and mental imbalance she had suffered as a result of that abortion. Tom is made to leave his post as a history teacher because he had started deviating from the syllabus, telling his pupils his life story as an outlet for the pain he had suffered when his brother Dick committed suicide. Dick had suffered from an imbalance between physical strength and mental underdevelopment because he had been born as a result of his mother Helen’s incestuous relationship with her father Ernest. This pluperfect structure is reinforced by a distinction between two different narrative tenses: present continuous for the sections in the narrative present, simple past for those earlier events that ‘explain’ them. As Christine Brooke-​Rose noted in an earlier study of narrative

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time, it is ‘not tense alone’ that distinguishes between different concepts of narrative time, but also context and form.26 Swift uses the combination of a general pluperfect shape with tenses that are not technically pluperfect to achieve a similar portrayal of the relationship between past and present in his 1995 novel Last Orders. Ostensibly it is about the illness and death of a retired butcher, Jack Dodds. The narrative present is the day after Jack’s funeral when his son Vince and his friends Ray and Lenny drive to Margate to scatter his ashes from the pier. As the narrative progresses, it reveals more about the life stories of these people and their relationships over the course of a whole lifetime. Vince had grown up refusing to become a butcher because he had discovered that Jack was not his father and so he did not want to continue the family business. Amy has spent her adult life visiting her brain-​ damaged daughter June in hospital alone because Jack had refused to acknowledge the baby as his own. Ray has had a secret affair with Amy because his own wife Carol had left him. Jack offered to buy Ray’s camper van for a thousand pounds but Ray declined because it had become his means of meeting Amy. There is the same movement back and forth between past and present as there was in Waterland, and the same pluperfect narrative structure is used to suggest an approximate causality between them. Raymond Williams pointed out once that when thinking about the relationship between the past and the present, the ability to think and to imagine in different tenses is important because rather than seeing history as always-​already determinate of the present and of the future, it provides for the possibility of envisaging change.27 The sense of determinism in Last Orders is loose and open-​ ended because, as in Waterland, there is an ambiguous conclusion that defies too rigid an interpretation along the lines of simple cause and effect. Years after Ray’s affair with Amy, Jack lies dying in hospital and asks Ray to gamble a thousand pounds on a horse race so that if he wins Amy can pay off the debts she will otherwise inherit from his bankrupt business. That Swift intends this figure to mirror the sum Jack had earlier offered Ray for his van –​and hence to put an end to Ray’s affair with Amy –​is underlined by Ray’s words, ‘think of it as the price of a camper’.28 This is tantamount to a recognition that Jack had known about Ray and Amy’s affair all along, so when the horse wins and Jack dies, Ray is left with a dilemma. To give the winnings to Amy –​with Jack’s apparent blessing –​feels like saying that Jack is happy for them to resume their affair. But Ray doesn’t know how Amy will react to this decision, and despite its presentation of how the past affects what happens in the present, the novel ends ambiguously, eluding a rigid determinism.

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The combination of a pluperfect narrative structure (that implies that the present is directed by the past) with an open-​ended conclusion (that resists evoking predetermination) recurs across Waterland and Last Orders. There is also an important technical innovation in the latter novel. Whereas Waterland was narrated by a single voice, Last Orders is narrated by several speakers. It consists of a series of monologues in which the reader is positioned as a listener or confidant for the characters. Each of those characters has a particular vocation such as butcher (Jack), undertaker (Vic), naval officer (Lenny), mother (Amy) and gambler (Ray). Using McIlveen and Patton’s taxonomy of different levels of life storytelling, these vocations can be understood as the micro-​themes of each individual’s life story. But McIlveen and Patton’s point about different kinds of life themes is that making career choices requires a meaningful compromise between what is chosen and a whole series of external constraints and material limitations (categorized by McIlveen and Patton as exo-​themes). When all the vocations in Last Orders enter a crisis in one form or another, the characters in question continually have recourse to narrating their life story as a means of making sense of it. The act of narration represents a shift in micro-​theme for each character, away from the individual vocation in question towards a secondary, supra-​level vocation of storyteller that is common to them all. Because this second level of vocation is activated through a changing sense of self across time, it corresponds to McIlveen and Patton’s concept of a mesmo-​theme. The idea of the mesmo-​theme was developed to allow for the possibility of an individual’s sense of self being conceptualized in a dialogical way that is not restricted to a single vocation but can undergo shifts or discontinuities in the poetics of personhood and so narrate two or more different life stories. The insight of McIlveen and Patton is that an individual can only perform those different roles which he can fully envisage so that somebody unable to narrate different kinds of life stories is likely to find the range of different I-​positions open to him more limited than somebody who can. By speaking as both a butcher and as a storyteller, Jack Dodds shifts from mere micro-​theme to a wider mesmo-​ theme. Since all of his characters express a vocational personality combined with the mesmo-​thematic vocation of the storyteller, Swift himself can also be considered to have made this transition. Between the writing of Waterland (1983) and that of Last Orders (1995) his career followed a trajectory away from that of a single storyteller (micro-​theme) towards that of the teller of multiple different stories (mesmo-​theme). It was argued above that Booth’s implied author and Rabinowitz’s authorial audience can usefully be combined in analysis of fictions of self-​retrospect if each

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is allowed to incorporate not only the author’s idea of the audience he is writing for, but also the author’s idea of the audience’s idea of the author. Both the critical success and recurring style of Waterland (1983) and Last Orders (1995) can be said to have created a set of expectations for Swift’s subsequent work. This is not a matter of Swift finding out empirically what specific expectations particular readers had of his next work; or of gauging how he ‘really’ responded to them. It is, rather, a theoretical way of conceptualizing how the author re-​creates himself in each new work by entering into a dialogue with his earlier authorial selves: imagining how the reader imagines the writer provides the occasion for the dialogue. Or as Brooke-​Rose had earlier put it, although the reading ‘comes after the work’ there is nevertheless a ‘mutually regenerative influence’.29 To generate a narrative of self as the teller of life stories at the level of exo-​theme requires a compromise between inner aspects of self that can be controlled and outer aspects that cannot. In the case of retrospective fictions, audience expectation –​or more specifically, author anticipation of audience expectation –​can be seen as one of those external factors. This is another way of asserting McIlveen and Patton’s point that the self –​in this case, the authorial self –​is constituted through interaction. As we have seen, in order for dialogue to enable a potential recreation of the construction of the self, at least three interactions are necessary. This is precisely the number that occurs in the author’s figuring of the audience if the authorial audience is seen as containing the author’s image of the audience’s image of himself, and by extension, his work. Thus Swift’s writing of the major novels Waterland and Wish You Were Here can be seen as a first interaction (a to b); his readers’ encounter with them as a second (b back to a); and his capacity to conceptualize his audience’s expectation of himself and to respond in advance to that expectation while writing his next novel can be seen as a third (a to b again) at which point his behaviour, that is, the kind of novel he writes, has changed. This is what happened as Swift moved into the career stage of his later novel, Wish You Were Here (2011). Wish You Were Here bears many of the hallmarks of the earlier novels: the strong sense of place; the elegy for the passing of a way of life in a particular part of England; and the characteristic combination of a present vocational crisis with a pluperfect narrative structure. It starts with Jack Luxton travelling to a military base in Oxfordshire from his home on the Isle of Wight to collect the body of his brother Tom who had been killed in Iraq. The journey then elucidates memories of Jack and Tom’s relationship with other members of their family and friends and the fraught process by which they had escaped the farm that their father Michael had hoped they would continue to manage.

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Perhaps because of its repetition of the stylistic features common to the earlier novels, the critical reception to Wish You Were Here on its publication was generally negative. Criticism was explicitly couched in the form of a decline narrative, finding Wish You Were Here wanting when specifically compared to the earlier works. Benjamin Markovits in the Guardian found that ‘[t]‌his meditation on Englishness echoes but ultimately fails to match Swift’s Booker-​ winning Last Orders’.30 Leo Robson in the Telegraph warned that ‘[r]eaders of his previous novels may find themselves groaning with familiarity’.31 Linda Grant in the Financial Times suggested that the novel occupied the same ‘territory’ as Swift’s two ‘landmark’ works Waterland and Last Orders, and defined that territory as ‘the context of what has happened to rural England in the past forty years’.32 Critical responses to the novel were similar in North America, where Mark Athitakis of the Star Tribune considered it ‘a kind of successor to Last Orders’.33 Stacey D’Erasmo in the New York Times found the prose so reflective that ‘[o]ne might, every now and then, be excused for wishing Swift could get to the point a little less discreetly and with less use of the past perfect tense’.34 In fact, the use of tense identified in this last review is stylistically what distinguishes Wish You Were Here from the earlier novels. Waterland and Last Orders evoked an implicit pluperfect temporality by employing a double time frame, signalled to readers by a distinction between the use of present tense and simple past. In Wish You Were Here too there is a double time frame: the narrative present is simply one day in 2006, during which Jack Luxton sits at home in his caravan park on the Isle of Wight waiting with a loaded gun for his wife Ellie to return. The thoughts and memories of what had happened to bring him to this point form the majority of the novel. Unlike the earlier novels, though, the distinction between past events and present crisis is not maintained through the alternation between present and simple past narrative tenses. Instead, the whole novel is narrated, page after page after page, in the much more narratologically difficult tense of the pluperfect. That is, the incipient temporality of the earlier novels has become in Wish You Were Here much more rigid and explicit at both levels. Jack Luxton’s letter from an army officer informing him of his brother Tom’s death; Tom’s earlier decision to run away from the family’s Jebb Farm to join the army; their father’s suicidal despair at the crisis in agriculture exacerbated by foot and mouth disease; their mother’s death even earlier; memories of the caravan holidays she used to take them on when they were boys; and Ellie’s persuasion of Jack once his parents were dead to sell the farm and move to the holiday camp. All of these are rendered in the pluperfect, to the extent that

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isolating a short example from the text is difficult. Nevertheless, the following passage in which Jack starts by thinking about the official news of Tom’s death and ends up thinking about the earlier occasion when he had written to Tom with news of their father’s death, may be considered typical: They’d got the letter nine days ago, though, strictly speaking, there was no ‘they’ about it, the operative phrase being ‘next of kin’. Tom must either have put down his brother’s name from the very beginning, or made the substitution when necessary. On that question Jack could never be sure, seeing as Tom had never answered any of his letters. There’d been precious few of them, it was true, but they’d included the letter that had cost Jack an agony to write, about the death and funeral arrangements of Michael Luxton. It had cost him several long hours and several torn-​up sheets of paper, of which there was never a big supply at Jebb, though even as he’d written it he’d wondered how much pain in it there would really be for Tom.35

The pluperfect is a tense rarely employed for lengthy narration. It is used in fiction to establish a change in time frame or to establish a different point in narrative chronology. Once that change has been established, the narrative tense conventionally then reverts to the simple past or even the present because ‘once anteriority has been established, there is no need to persist with a cumbersome form’.36 This convention exists primarily because the pluperfect is an awkward tense: difficult to use for long narrative sequences without either breaking up the flow of the narrative or allowing the prose to become stilted and artificial. If it is difficult to maintain for the writer, it is also a difficult tense to follow for the reader, especially in cases such as Wish You Were Here where it dominates not just sentences and paragraphs but whole chapters and indeed the whole novel. Not only does it create a sense of endless digression and deferment, frustrating a reader’s desire to know why Jack is holding a gun and whether or not he will end up using it, it also creates an overall atmosphere that feels much more harsh and uncompromising than that suggested by the loose interplay between narrative tenses used in the earlier novels. The free play of the time frames is replaced by a much more stringent sense of determinism and the impossibility of escape. As such, it is a demanding reading experience because it requires its reader to accept such a harsh causality. The capacity of a text to place extreme demands on the reader without regard to the ease of their experience is how Edward Said typified the stylistic features associated with late works. Yet Chapter  1 suggested that Said was unable to

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define or situate the concept of the belated, the characteristic aesthetics of which he nevertheless described. Wish You Were Here is a belated work not necessarily because it occurs late in Swift’s career –​only time will tell if that is the case –​but because it was written in the co-​presence of those earlier works in the shadow of which it too must live. This sense of the belatedness of the text, together with its stylistic bleakness, are perhaps also why the sense of vocation in Wish You Were Here is expressed as a negative limit, whereas in Swift’s earlier novels it was experienced as positive aspiration. Tom Crick has a vocation to be a teacher; Jack Dodds has a vocation to be a butcher. By contrast, Jack and Tom in Wish You Were Here have a vocation to escape from the family farm –​and do something different. The vocations thus express a negative capability that enables their lives to be converted once more into narrative, so that they too are surrogates for Swift’s supra-​vocation as storyteller at the level of what McIlveen and Patton define as a career macro-​ theme. Those characters can be said to represent fictional versions of Swift himself, not only because they speculate in a profoundly self-​reflective way on what they might do differently, but also because just as their vocations have become defined as vocations to escape, so too Swift at a later stage in his career could be said to have redefined his vocation as a writer. Not only now a vocation to write, but also a vocation to write something that will redefine the characteristic forms and themes for which he had become known at the earlier stages of his career. He revisits those themes consciously by doing something new with the material that already existed and so entering a new stage with a new kind of creativity. That is to say, the macro-​theme of Swift’s career, his commitment to storytelling as such, is not only a series of discrete portrayals of other people’s vocations; it is also a cumulative expression of his own.

Notes 1 Tom Kindt and Hans-​Harald Müller, The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), p. 5. 2 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 34. 3 McIlveen and Patton, ‘Dialogical Self ’, p. 73. 4 Ibid., p. 73. 5 Ibid., p. 72. 6 Ibid., p. 73. 7 Ibid.

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Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 72. Peter Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 2. 12 Eefje Claassen, Author Representations in Literary Reading (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), p. 134. 13 Kindt and Müller, The Implied Author, p. 30. 14 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 127. 15 Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 71. 16 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 66. 17 Kindt and Müller, The Implied Author, p. 4. 18 Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 71. 19 Ibid., p. 148. 20 Ibid. 21 See for example Gerard Genette, Paratexts, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 64–​74. 22 Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 159. 23 Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 232. 24 Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 149. 25 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 123. 26 Christine Brooke-​Rose, ‘Transgressions: An Essay-​Say on the Novel Novel Novel’, Contemporary Literature, 19 (3), 1978, p. 386. 27 Raymond Williams, ‘The Tenses of Imagination’ in his Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1984), pp. 260–​61. 28 Graham Swift, Last Orders (London: Picador, 1995), p. 224. 29 Christine Brooke-​Rose, ‘Transgressions’, p. 378. 30 Benjamin Markovits, ‘Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift –​Review’, Guardian, 12 June 2011. 31 Leo Robson, ‘Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift: Review’, Telegraph, 20 June 2011. 32 Linda Grant, ‘Wish You Were Here’, Financial Times, 3 June 2012. 33 Mark Athitakis, ‘“Wish You Were Here” by Graham Swift’, Star Tribune, 28 April 2012. 34 Stacey D’Erasmo, ‘Wish You Were Here, by Graham Swift’, New York Times, 20 April 2012.

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35 Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here (London: Picador, 2011), p. 75. 36 Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 181.

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Imaginary Authors of Real Books

The previous chapters have argued that the notion of lateness can usefully be supplanted by the idea of the retrospective in order to liberate both concepts from the mere fact of chronological age. Considering the different stages that collectively make up an author’s career necessitates an understanding of the different subject positions occupied by ostensibly the same author across time. As a result, each new stage is an opportunity for authorial self-​renewal. This is achieved through creative and often self-​reflective communication with what has gone before. This chapter will build on the career constructivist idea of the authorial self by adding to it the social sciences concept of the self as portraitist. The method of portraiture in the social sciences was developed by Sara Lawrence-​Lightfoot as a qualitative means of understanding the complex dynamics of public institutions, especially educational establishments, community centres and arts organizations and the people within them. As such, her research portraitist has many of the characteristics of Mark Savickas’s career counsellor. Indeed, Savickas’s work is in part derived from that of Lawrence-​Lightfoot. In her practice, the researcher creates critical portraits of a particular institution in order to be read by members of that institution, the better to understand themselves. In career counselling, the counsellor assists clients to create their own life portraits, and heightened self-​awareness comes about through the process of composition rather than through reading and reception. This means that Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Savickas treat portraitist and subject in complementary ways. Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s approach to portraiture in the domain of the social sciences will be combined here with Savickas’s notion of the life portrait in the field of career counselling and applied to the current discussion of authorial careers to argue that the author as portraitist is a figure emerging specifically during the retrospective stage of an authorial career. This emergence will be demonstrated in the case of the novels The Seymour Tapes (Tim Lott, 2005); A History of the

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World in Ten and a Half Chapters (Julian Barnes, 1989) and Scandal (Shūsaku Endō, 1988). In each case, as we shall see, the author is posited as an imaginary figure who is nevertheless the author of his or her own ‘real’ books –​thereby producing a series of life portraits in Savickas’s sense.

On portraiture as art and science Portraiture is a method that was developed in the social sciences in North America as a deliberate contrast to the prevailing positivistic and diagnostic methods for researching how institutions work. Existing methods tended to begin with the assumption of organizational failure or error and proceeded to propose remedial action from that point. The method of narrative portraiture, by contrast, begins with the premise that organizations are capable of achieving social benefit and effective cultural contribution despite the sometimes adverse contexts in which they participate. In practice, much of Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s work takes the form of case studies: this is one of the many nodes of intersection between it and the field of career construction theory. In researching a given public organization such as a school she would typically make a number of field trips to it, concentrating on gathering different kinds of information each time and moving from the general to the particular. For example, her opening visit would record some account of the context in which the research takes place, her feelings prior to arriving at the organization and her first impressions of it. Over subsequent visits she meets a broad cross-​section of individuals within the organization, including professional, support and ancillary workers. Some of these meetings take the form of recorded, formal interviews; others are less formal. Developing her understanding of the relationships that make the school function, the themes that emerge as being of particular importance to its members and the opportunities for expressing those themes at the level of collective voice all contribute to her final overall portrait of the school. In it, she integrates the minute details that she has encountered with the overall structure of the organization in a way that enables her to identify its core values and reinterpret them for its members. This collective self-​knowledge of a shared fundamental ethos can then be used as a governing point of reference for future action within the organization. At the theoretical level, there are three main components to Lawrence-​ Lightfoot’s practice of portraiture. These are a combination of the scientific stance

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of the researcher with the creative skill of the artist; a critical self-​awareness on the part of the portraitist; and the potentially transformative nature of the encounter between the portrait and its subject(s). Of these, the fusion of scientific research methodology with the attributes and artistic craft of a novelist is the most fundamental. The aim of her portraits is that they should reveal institutions and their members to themselves in a new light, in order to generate better understanding of the institution among its people. This means that those people ought to be able to discern themselves in the portrait, but, at the same time, such recognition is likely to be troubling because they are seeing themselves in a different and challenging way. The key features of an institution, that is, its aims, its role, its culture, its history and its ethos, are gathered together by the researcher during the field work using the methods appropriate to social science research. But the final portrait must be more than a list of raw data or a catalogue of institutional mission statements. It needs also to create a bridge of empathetic identification that motivates people in the institution to read it, and having read it, to feel inspired by it to renew their commitment to its core values. This empathetic identification is created by writing the report in the form of a portrait, or narrative, in which the readers feature prominently both as protagonists and authors of the next chapter. This means that the distinction between portraitist, researcher, author and subject can appear confused, mainly because the portraitist or novelist is really the researcher or analyst and because ‘portraiture’ is primarily a form of written narrative: In the methodology of portraiture, the aesthetic aspects of production that can contribute to the expressive content include the use of keen descriptors that delineate, like line; dissonant refrains that provide nuance, like shadow; and complex details that evoke the impact of color and the intricacy of texture. The forms that are delineated convene into emergent themes and the interrelationship of these themes is woven through the connections of their content against the backdrop of their shared context.1

Chapter  1 argued that one of the advantages of using career construction theory to define and analyse fictions of self-​retrospect is the way it combines identification of discrete career stages with consistent metaphors of authorship. Those metaphors, it was suggested, are literally instantiated in cases of authorial careers. In Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Davis’s comparison of the dissonant refrains in narrative to the subtle gradations and nuances of visual art there is a similar metaphor. Indeed, in social science portraiture, the portraits are not merely like

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Table 1  Domains of portraiture Role

Domain

Subject

Reader

Researcher Counsellor Author Scholar

Social Sciences Career Counselling Literature Research and Scholarship

Institution Client Fictive Self Text

Actors/​Agents Individual Reading Public Peers/​Colleagues

novels, they are novels –​albeit short ones. Since Raymond Williams argues that the case studies of Sigmund Freud can also been read in this novelistic way, the field of social sciences portraiture is one in which the separate disciplines of psychoanalysis and career construction –​which have become rapidly divergent since their common origin in psychology –​can provisionally be reconnected.2 Overall, the process of portraiture implies that the roles of researcher, author, subject and agent are overlapped and intertwined. Table 1 displays the different kinds of roles that portraitists play and the different domains in which they operate. A policy researcher, operating in the domain of institutional research in the social sciences, takes as her subject the institution that she is researching and creates a portrait of it that will primarily be read by its own members, who will hopefully act upon it in their future professional lives. As we will see later in this chapter, a career counsellor, by contrast, operates in the specific domain of career construction. His subject is the individual client who has come to consult him, and that individual client will also be the first reader of the portrait that is created during the counselling process. This contrasts with the author of literary works, whose subjects are typically so many different fictive selves and whose readers will be the general public. The point could also be extended to suggest that a literary critic or scholar also creates certain kinds of portraits, the subjects of which are the portraits (the literary works) created by the author. Lawrence-​Lightfoot identifies the different roles of a portraitist when she discusses the personal context in which the research portraitist operates. She refers to this context as the ‘the experiential repertoire of the researcher’ and suggests that it has a bearing on the researcher’s perception and presentation of the subject.3 Since the representation of the subject always includes an element of the researcher’s own voice, it is possible to see the experiential repertoire as incorporating both the aggregate of the portraitist’s prior accumulated works and the processes and relationships in which she was involved while producing them. Where the portraitist is a social sciences researcher, this portfolio of

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accumulated endeavours would clearly include earlier research projects and their final written forms. Where the artist is an author of fiction, it includes the previously completed and published works that are already at least potentially familiar to the audience and which therefore feed in to how the author conceives of the reader he assumes he is writing for and, in doing so, conceptualizes also an element of himself. Although the roles of portraitist, researcher, artist, author and writer are constantly intertwined, the notion of the experiential repertoire is analytically useful as it draws attention to how artistic convention enables the portraitist to consider in advance how she will be perceived by the audience: ‘Like artists, portraitists consider the needs of the reader in reinterpreting their work and thereby anticipate the relationship between reader and work and reader and portraitist as they create their representations.’4

The critical self-​awareness of the researcher The concept of experiential repertoire suggests that the stance and values of the research portraitist can inflect the findings of the research and hence the make-​ up of the final portrait in subtle and complicated ways. This is because an institutional portrait reveals to its members their fundamental goal and shared values rather than merely enumerating external details. In effect, the social sciences portraitist does not tell us how the institution eternally is, but rather how it appears to her. The provisional methodology employed implies a critical self-​consciousness on the part of the researcher that in turn becomes manifest in the written portrait: The message expressed in a painting or a research portrait is the vision of the artist or researcher … Vision is made apparent by the hand of the artist constructing the painting and the voice of the researcher constructing the narrative. Hand and voice also make apparent the judgements that have been made in the balancing of the separate aesthetic aspects of the portrait into a cohesive aesthetic whole.5

The practice of portraiture is accompanied by a methodological shift away from the assumption of the scientist as discoverer of objective truths in a factual sense, and towards the self-​conscious narrative expression of gradually revealed, sometimes contradictory and always developing ideas. This is another reason why the behaviour attributes of a novelist or artist are necessary tools in the portraitist’s locker. Works of art and literature –​unlike scientific reports –​express resonant human truths in a non-​factual way. Making present the voice or hand of the artist

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in the portrait tends towards the creation and expression of a narrative ‘I’ more commonly associated with the literary arts than the sciences. The expression of the voice of the ‘I’ carrying out the research enables the continual revisiting and adjusting of starting assumptions that was referred to in Chapter 1 as meta-​ reflection. To put it another way, the openly articulated voice of the research artist in social sciences portraiture creates both a context and a method for the expression of a dialogic self interacting with the research environment to their mutual transformation. A researcher brings to the project an experiential repertoire that both structures the current project and is informed and expanded by it. This points to a dynamic interplay between different temporalities embodied by the figure of the portraitist, whose understanding both of the work and her role in it undergo modification during the process. Arising from this dynamic, the final written portrait is both a stable snapshot of an institution at a precise moment in time and something atemporal. On the one hand it is a portrait as recorded by the portraitist at the culmination of the research, including the trace of the portraitist as that moment. On the other, the representational methods and techniques drawn upon in compiling it have all been developing during the whole process of the research so that it cannot simply refer to a single temporal instant but must both include and even putatively unify a whole series of moments at which artist intersects with subject. For the portraitist, therefore, discontinuities in the narrative self are placed in the service of an overarching narrative of her temporally varying stance towards the subject. Since the portrait is dialogic, its narrative resolves the temporal inconsistencies between perspectives precisely because they are non-​synchronous with each other. The researcher evolves and develops new ways of recording her self, corresponding to real changes in her experiential repertoire, during the course of the research. That is, by the end of the research her expression of self is both the same and not the same as it was at the beginning. In this sense, the portrait is something akin to the Derridean supplement. It encounters something already complete and renders it newly and differently so.6

The potential for self-​transformation by the subject Since the goal of portraiture is to reveal the self of the subject in a new way, the differentiation between temporal selves on the part of the researcher can be likened to a form of transference. That is, the subject  –​like the portraitist –​undergoes a temporal modification. Where the subject is an institution or

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organization, its members might see themselves in new ways after reading their portrait, just as the artist too has undergone transformative involvement in the relationship. The portrait gives subjects a new point of reference for projecting their collective selves outwards in the future, as well as giving the artist new ways of representing other comparable subjects both to herself and to others, as part of an expanded and adjusted experiential repertoire. This is not merely to say that the distinction between portraitist and subject is blurred, but it also points to a formative dialectical encounter that is mutually constitutive and where the real agency of the transformation resides in the relationship itself. This is because the close observation and involvement inherent in portrait writing binds the researcher to her subjects just as there is a contractual relationship between a novelist and his readers. The contract enables the creation of a portrait through access to the minutiae and particulars of the organization, which its insiders know intimately. Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Davis take the view that encounters with portraits are potentially transformative. That is, such encounters both enable individual viewers to perceive the world in a new way, and at the same time to develop the potential for reimagining their own place in it. In fact the goal of social sciences portraiture is to reveal its subjects to themselves in a way that had not previously been apparent to them, and which they might at first not even recognize as themselves, but which nevertheless says something both fundamental and transcendent about them. When the viewer of a portrait starts to develop her own capacity for critical consideration of the self, therefore, she becomes a kind of portraitist as well. The final insight put forward by Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Davis is that since each person’s understanding of a portrait is particular to them, the meaning of the work is renegotiated each time somebody new perceives it: ‘This new interpretation of the subject on the part of the reader or perceiver can be thought of as a kind of reinterpretation. With each reinterpretation, it is as if the portrait is being recreated.’7 Keeping in mind here that portraiture is a metaphor for forms of written narrative, ‘perceiver’ is a precise and particular word, used to refer to a specific way of understanding the relationship between portraitist and reader. Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s ‘perceiver’ is congruent with the concept of ‘implied reader’ discussed in the previous chapter. There, it was argued that Booth’s notion of the implied reader can be extended in cases of fictions of self-​ retrospect to include an aspect of the artist or author’s self-​image since it encompasses both an expectation for the kind of reader he imagines himself to be writing for; and the expectation that reader in turn has of him. When considered

6

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in this way, ‘perceiver’ too becomes a term that covers both ‘artist’ and ‘audience’, or author and reader, and incorporates also the relationship between the two. Knowing in advance that the perceiver has this dynamic capacity for involvement in the overall process, the portraitist anticipates the possible intervention of the viewer and builds it too into the composition. That is, the portraitist writes a written portrait that is akin to a short novel. Moreover, because it is written for an assumed or implied reader, the portraitist figuratively constructs a mental approximation for how the reader might respond to it and allows that approximation to inform her own process of writing it, so that the anticipation of the reader equates to an expression of the artist’s self as artist. Davis uses the metaphor of a game of chess to describe this two-​way relationship in which artist and audience perceive the attributes of the other: In the process of turning the paper and assessing the next move, the creator of the drawing is aware of that relationship; is repeatedly considering what the viewer will need to make sense of the portrayal, reading the text as if it were written by someone else. In the same way, the perceiver, identified with the artist, may consider his or her own interpretation as it is aligned with the drawing.8

In a game of chess, a player contemplating a particular move must think about how his opponent will react to that move; how that reaction will affect the overall dynamic of the game and how he will in turn react to that reaction. The most important consideration for a chess player is not only the next move but also the one after the next. Metaphorically speaking, this is also true of the relationship between the portraitist and the audience. Thinking about the audience is in part a way by which the artist thinks about her own action, just as thinking about his opponent’s move is a part of how the chess player addresses his own.

From social science to career construction: theorizing life portraits The first two chapters identified the narrative basis of career construction theory as a new method in career counselling that arose at the end of the twentieth century. Career construction posits its clients as metaphoric authors of their own life stories and elicits from them potential new career chapters. Indeed, Savickas extends the metaphor by suggesting that a client’s career uncertainty is tantamount to a form of ‘writer’s block’.9 The metaphor of authorship is instantiated in the written narratives that a career counsellor and his client co-​construct during

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the counselling process. Partly inspired by Lawrence-​Lightfoot, Savickas refers to these reports as life portraits.10 A life portrait is a narrative capable of articulating simultaneity and temporal difference in the client’s sense of self and professional achievement through the interplay of differently figured career phases. The most important characteristic of a life portrait is that it is dynamic and evolving rather than static or synchronic. It is typically elicited by the counsellor from the client in the form of a career interview, which aims to fulfil three different expectations. First, the narrative should assimilate each of the client’s experiences across a range of seeming diversity. Then it provides a conceptual meta-​narrative that coherently fills the explicatory gaps between the diverse stages and roles. Finally, this conceptual meta-​narrative aids the client to come to a new perspective on his professional development, which invigorates him into future action. According to Maree, during the career interview the counsellor should maintain at all times a stance of not knowing, thereby continually asking clarifying questions of the client. This facilitates the client’s capacity for ‘guided self advice’ and hence the co-​construction of a life portrait.11 As discussed in Chapter 1, the career interview frequently elicits childhood memories and the emotional experiences associated with them as well as identifying specific people whom the client admires and his reasons for admiring them (these could be public figures, people known to the client personally or even fictional characters). In discussing the character attributes and attitudes they admire, clients are in fact talking about their own vocational personality and aspirations. However, they will not necessarily realize that this is the case, especially at the start of the process. Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s portrait method mobilizes a dynamic interplay between identification and misrecognition. That is, the subjects of her portraits should be able to discern core aspects of themselves in the portraits she creates on the one hand; but these should look new and somewhat critically estranged in order to generate new forms of collective self-​knowledge on the other. In career counselling too, the client might either recognize himself in the portrait and so start authoring his own new narrative of selfhood by applying this new level of self-​understanding; or misrecognize the portrait as a portrait of his own self and so fail to act upon it. Thus the aim of using narratives drawn from the client’s own life to build up a diachronic life portrait is that he is gradually able to recognize that in talking about others he is also talking about his potential self:  ‘Practitioners use the weight of past experiences to confirm the present poetics of personhood and future politics of career construction.’12

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Although Savickas does not precisely define the elegant phrase ‘poetics of personhood’, he appears to use it to refer to many of the theoretical factors to be taken into account when creating a life portrait. One of the arguments advanced by Edward Said in On Late Style is that works of art created during the later stages of artistic careers are often conceptually meta-​textual, having some account of their genesis and development built into their formal composition. Thus writing about writing can be considered metafictive; theatre about theatre can be called ‘meta-​theatrical’ and music about music can be termed ‘meta-​musical’.13 Drawing on his narrative metaphor, Savickas goes a step further and suggests that this meta-​textual aspect is typical of the later stages of all careers, artistic or otherwise: ‘Individuals construct a self by reflecting on experience using the uniquely human capacity to be conscious of consciousness. Self-​consciousness, or awareness of awareness, requires language.’14 Substituting the concept of lateness with that of the retrospective as advocated in Chapter 1, we can say that the practice of meta-​textuality typically arises during the retrospective stages of a given career with regard to any earlier discretely defined stage. For most people in career counselling this meta-​textuality is predominantly metaphoric, and refers to the life portraits that they create during counselling as a means of developing a newly defined sense of self. In authorial careers, the practice of meta-​reflection, or reflection upon reflection, is adopted as a specific artistic technique. Fictions of self-​retrospect can be seen as an authorial expression of the poetics of personhood for the same reason. But having identified the common origins of career life portraits and the social sciences practice of portraiture, it is important to clarify also some of the differences between them. Table  2 lists the specific activities and behaviours associated with different kinds of portraitists. These depart from Tereza Pavlíčková’s ‘multidimensional model of aspects of authorial personae’, which are mainly distinguished from each other according to the form of production in which the author is involved, the means of identifying the author available to the reader and the Table 2  Portraitist behaviours Domain

Attributes

Activity

Behaviour

Social Sciences Career Counselling Literature Research and Scholarship

Proactive Reactive Iterative Reflective

Reconstruction Co-​construction Construction Deconstruction

Novelist Mentor/​Confidant Storyteller Analyst

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perceived status of the author.15 My different interest in the attributes and behaviours of the portraitist identifies a model for defining the different kinds of roles authors perform and the different impressions of an author evinced by different texts. A social science researcher such as Lawrence-​Lightfoot proactively visits the institution she is researching and conducts interviews and case studies with as many of the members of that institution as possible. She then behaves like a novelist when she writes these interviews up in the form of a reassembled, or reconstructed, portrait of that institution in which its core values, its ethos and its major challenges become recognizable to those members in new ways. A career counsellor, by contrast, takes a more reactive approach. That is not to say (as certain counsellors assume) that clients only enter counselling ‘when things go wrong’, or that career counselling itself is necessarily an inherently remedial activity.16 It is to assert, though, that a counsellor tends not to start developing a portrait of a client until contacted by the client. This is the fundamental starting point. The counsellor behaves like a confidant or mentor when he listens and reacts to the life themes, micro-​narratives, needs and desires of the client and then helps her produce a portrait of her own self the better to attain a higher level of self-​knowledge. In many cases, the counsellor and the client produce this portrait together so that whereas a social science researcher mainly engages in reconstructing a portrait of an institution, the counsellor and client participate in a joint process of co-​constructing the portrait of the individual in question. While the researcher and the counsellor are involved in reconstruction and co-​construction, and behave like a novelist and a confidant respectively, we can say that the critical scholar mainly deconstructs literary works and behaves like an analyst. I use deconstruction here not necessarily in the specialist literary-​ theoretical sense proposed by Derrida, Spivak and others, but as a more general term to refer in very broad terms to what literary scholars do when they examine a literary object. Inasmuch as a form of writing can ever be described as a portrait in the literal sense, the most overt form of portrait is that which we find in literary works: fictional portrayals which the author, through the repeated iteration of different works, constructs over time. But the act of sitting at a desk writing, not to mention the business of a literary career which includes drafting, redrafting, editing, communicating with publishers and agents, submitting accounts, signing contracts, attending talks, lectures, readings and other public events and the full

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range of professional activity are occluded by the final text itself. This means that the typical kinds of behaviour evoked by the impression of the author from within a given text is less that of a novelist as such, and more that of a storyteller. This situation contrasts with the social sciences, whose activity foregrounds professional activity in all its diversity and whose final portrait therefore evinces the impression of an author whose behaviour types are those of a novelist, even though the social sciences researcher is not one. Or to put it more briefly, the impression a novel generates of its author is the impression of a storyteller rather than a novelist per se; whereas the impression a social sciences report generates of its author is the impression of a novelist. In fact, in their work authors tend to experiment with these different behavioural attributes, which can be seen as different components of the author function. That experimentation in turn plays a large part in deciding what kind of portrait will be created. Table  3 lists different kinds of textual objects corresponding to the different activities and behavioural attributes evinced by the four different kinds of portraitists discussed here:  the researcher, counsellor, author and scholar. Again, of these, the one whose work most closely resembles that of a portraitist on a literal level is the author, who constructs portraits of various fictional selves and tells the life stories of those selves in the manner of a storyteller. These portraits can be considered life portraits not only on the banal commonplace grounds that all writers draw on their own experiences, but in the more conceptual sense according to which their works are self-​portraits of fictional selves. Unlike an author, a career counsellor’s first task is to earn the trust of his client, with whom he behaves like a mentor or confidant and along with whom he participates in co-​constructing a portrait of them. This means that the portrait constructed is a self-​portrait because the counsellor is involved in it. But it is necessarily a different kind of self-​portrait from that produced by an author. It is not a portrait of a fictive self, or even of the counsellor’s own self. It is rather a portrait of the other person involved in co-​construction with the counsellor: the

Table 3  Objects of portraiture Role

Behaviour

Activity

Object

Researcher Counsellor Author Scholar

Novelist Mentor/​Confidant Storyteller Analyst

Reconstruction Co-​construction Construction Deconstruction

Self-​portrait as Other Self-​portrait of Other Self-​portrait Self-​portrait by Other

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client. In other words, the portrait produced by the counsellor is a self-​portrait of the other. The self-​portrait of the other is a form of portrait that contrasts in turn with that created by the social sciences researcher. As we have seen, the researcher behaves like a novelist when she listens to the myriad stories the members of an institution have to tell her and reconstructs them into a meaningful and coherent whole. Readers of the final portrait might initially misrecognize themselves in the portrait altogether because they have been presented in a new way. However, the intention is that as they read the portrait of their own institution, they gradually realize that what they are reading is in fact a portrait of themselves, presented in a perspective from which they had not previously thought about themselves. Because the social science portrait portrays institutions as something other than their members thought themselves to be, it can be considered a self-​portrait as other. Finally, the literary scholar produces a different form of written portrait again. According to Booth, one of the great weaknesses of some literary criticism is that it reduces artistic works to cumbersome analytic forms that are neither literary nor imaginative and can become ‘stultifying’ as a result.17 Harold Bloom makes a similar point about critical discussion of poetry, of which he suggests the two most common forms are tautology or reduction.18 That is, poems tend to be discussed in a way that posits their meaning as somehow self-​evident so that criticism and analysis add nothing to them; or in a way that generates new meaning and interpretation, but in a written commentary that is not itself poetic so that it misses the point of poetry. Bloom’s response, as we shall see in Chapter 6, is an ‘antithetical criticism’ in which critical writing itself is couched and expressed in a poetic idiom.19 Booth proposes the comparable idea of ‘overstanding’ –​as opposed to merely ‘understanding’ and hence repeating a literary text –​to suggest a means of discussing the text in a way that enables writing creatively in the critical as well as the ‘primary’ text.20 In other words, the kind of writing produced by a scholar or analyst should retain the imaginative element if it is to avoid both tautology and reduction. As a result, it too can be considered a form of portrait. But critical writing is writing about another author’s primary text; it is a portrait of somebody else’s portrait. For this reason it can appropriately be described as a self-​portrait by the other. Savickas’s career counsellor and Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s social science researcher both assume that apparently disparate elements in a narrative can be synchronized and resolved through the discovery of a meta-​narrative that provides thematic continuity in often surprising places. That is, the meta-​narrative uncovers

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a form of consistency across otherwise unreconciled life stages or between competing institutional priorities. Such a discovery was characterized in Chapter 2 as the shift between a micro-​theme and an exo-​or even macro-​theme in the career of the person in question. This way of considering a life portrait provides an opportunity for engagement with one of the questions that define fictions of self-​ retrospect, which is: how can artists reconcile their own non self-​identity with earlier manifestations of their artistic selves over time? The distinction between self-​portraits of the other, as the other and by the other represents different potential responses to this challenge, as the following examples in the work of Tim Lott, Julian Barnes and Shūsaku Endō will demonstrate.

Tim Lott’s self-​portrait of the other Tim Lott’s novel The Seymour Tapes (2005) is a portrayal of a fatally manipulated man, Dr Alex Seymour, who is ironically both trusting and paranoid. It is narrated by a homo-​diegetic narrator who shares a name and at least a few other attributes with its author, but who also enacts a form of de-​individuation from him. That is, it is a portrait that incorporates the presence of the portraitist in a way that renders the portraitist other than his own self. As explored above, the self-​portrait of the other is an artefact typically produced by a career counsellor in dialogue with his client. In doing so, the counsellor takes on the behavioural attributes of a mentor or confidant. In other words, in creating a self-​portrait of the textual other, Lott too assumes the characteristics of both counsellor and confidant. This has significant implications for the kind of text he produces. The Seymour Tapes is a latter-​day Othello in which the paranoid husband spies on his wife by means of concealed surveillance equipment. Seymour has been manipulated by the mysterious American Sherry Thomas into installing cameras to spy on his family and his patients. He comes to the conclusion that none of them have done anything wrong, but this is only because his wife Samantha had already discovered the cameras before he viewed the footage, and had thus been able to stage a scene apparently ‘proving’ that she was not having a secret love affair. The relationships portrayed in the novel take on the characteristics of a power game: Sherry has manipulated Alex, but Samantha manipulates Sherry in her turn. Alex dies without knowing that Samantha had been to see Sherry, forcing her to keep Samantha’s affair with Mark secret from Alex, by threatening to turn her in for a murder committed in the United States years earlier.

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Lott’s portrayal of the use of closed-​circuit cameras is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for the complicated embodiment of a self-​portrait of the other, directing readers’ attention as it does away from the plot and onto the framing perspective of the narrator as confidant. That framing is constructed through means of a number of paratextual devices, most notably a prologue undersigned and therefore ostensibly written by the author. In this prologue, Lott describes the process whereby after the traumatic events in the novel he is about to narrate had already concluded, he was approached by the survivor Samantha Seymour and asked to write a faithful narrative of them. That is, the prologue points in two directions at once: back out into the ‘real’ world on the one hand, and into the world of the fiction on the other. These two gestures enable it to serve two functions: establishing the credentials of a real empirical author while also establishing him as a character in the fiction he is about to narrate. For example, the narrator Lott writes of his surprise at being employed by Samantha Seymour to write the narrative because ‘[m]‌y only contribution to the world of nonfiction to date was my first book, The Scent of Dried Roses, concerning the suicide of my mother, and a short, briefly controversial article in a literary magazine about the break-​up of my marriage at the end of the 1990s’.21 That Lott is the author of a book published under the title he mentions on the subject of familial mental illness and depression is a verifiable, biographical fact. Understanding it as such contributes to readers’ recognition of the speaking, narrating Lott as empirical author of that book outside of and independent from the world of the fiction in the current book of which he is therefore also implicitly taken to be the bona fide author. On the other hand, the claim made by the prologue, that Lott was commissioned by Samantha to write the narrative of her true life, is less easy to verify. This is not least because it is fictitious, but also implicitly because even if it were true, it is a more complex kind of fact, less amenable to surface corroboration. Readers might know –​or think they know –​ the titles of books written by a given author as a matter of empirical experience in the real world, but deeper questions about that author’s biography –​who an author did or did not know, did or did not meet –​are often not available for easy verification. In other words, the exchange between the character Samantha and the author Lott has the effect of making Samantha seem a little more ‘real’ than a mere character to the exact extent that it does the opposite to Lott: making him a little less so. The prologue thus implies a semi-​fictionalization of Lott’s authorial self: written by Lott, but narrated by a character with the name ‘Lott’. That semi-​ fictionalization progresses throughout the novel, creating an increasing level of

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suspicion that the biographical facts it presents about Lott the author do not fully accord with those presented by ‘Lott’ the character/​narrator, even though the two share a common authorship of the existing book, The Scent of Dried Roses, which is repeatedly invoked as a marker of authenticity. In this way, the text creates a sense of otherness in the author’s self-​representation. The othering of the authorial self is brought about by a fission within the Lott-​figure portrayed, a fission that is tantamount to a doubling of function: author and character. It suggests a transactional relationship between Lott the author; Samantha, the woman who purportedly commissioned his work and ‘Lott’ the character. This relationship in turn enables Lott to separate the two functions from each other, recreating author as character and so reimagining himself as his own other. During the course of the contract ‘Lott’ enters into with Samantha, he is manipulated into sharing certain profound secrets with her as a token of trust and goodwill. One is of being caught masturbating by his uncle Thomas and threatening to tell his parents that the uncle had molested him if he tells them, prompting the uncle to cut off contact with the family and eventually die alone. The second is of having a near-​sexual encounter with his brother’s wife, Monique, in America some years before the action of the novel. The third is of being part of a gang of teenagers in Southall when one member kicked an Asian boy senseless. Three implications follow from these revelations. First of all, there is no way of verifying from within the text alone whether these life events were empirically experienced by the author Lott; by the fictional character (who is also an ‘author’), ‘Lott’ or by an uneasy combination of both. Lott’s secrets  –​real or imagined –​are thus projected onto ‘Lott’ and become another vehicle for the semi-​fictionalization of the author’s self, which is also another way of saying they contribute to the partial self reimagination of the author posed as other. Second, the confessions are of such a generic kind that readers of the novel, if they look hard enough, are likely to find comparable experiences in their own past lives and insert such experiences into their transactional relationship with the narrator. In this way, the transgressions are projected away from Lott or ‘Lott’ and outward, onto the reader who is therefore also amenable to the process of semi-​fictionalization. Closer examination of the revelations themselves forces us to ask: how much is really confessed? That he masturbated in adolescence. (What teenager has not?) That he nearly had an affair with his brother’s wife. (Which is to say, he did not). That someone he knew beat up another boy. (But it wasn’t him). The transgressions in question are both distanced from him, and highly generic in nature. This means that they are vague and elusive, scrupulously avoiding attributing real biographical information to either the empirical author

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Lott or the fictive author ‘Lott’, and thereby continuing the semi-​fictionalization of the real and the semi-​literalization of the fictive that is the novel’s central dynamic. Third, what readers know, or think they know, of the real empirical author Tim Lott is placed in constitutive dialectical tension with what they are unable either to verify or disprove. They know, or think they know, that Tim Lott is the real-​world author of The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), the fact of having written which is the main credential for ‘Tim Lott’ narrating The Seymour Tapes (2005). What they have no means of verifying one way or another, however, is whether or not The Scent of Dried Roses written by Tim Lott, author of The Seymour Tapes, is the same book as The Scent of Dried Roses written by ‘Tim Lott’, author in The Seymour Tapes. It seems more likely that they are two different books –​ one authentic and existing outside the novel, the other imaginary and existing only inside the world of the fiction –​which happen to share the same title and the authors of which happen to share the same name. This commonality of title between the fictive and the real contrasts with The Seymour Tapes itself. The Seymour Tapes is the title of a novel by Tim Lott about a character called ‘Tim Lott’ in the process of writing a novel. This fictive second novel is about the Seymour tapes, but is not titled The Seymour Tapes. Indeed, the likelihood of questions of his own biography detracting from the impact of the novel he is writing is one of the reasons assigned by the author Lott to the author-​character ‘Lott’ for not wanting to include the confessions Samantha extorts from him in the final written narrative: ‘Who, when buying a volume about the Seymour Tapes, would want to read the confessions of a minor writer? Samantha Seymour was not only hanging my dirty laundry out to dry, she was compromising the integrity of the final product.’22 In other words, the novel The Seymour Tapes posits the existence of a book that deals with the same subject it deals with –​the ‘Seymour Tapes’ –​but that is nevertheless a different book. Containing within The Seymour Tapes a fictive account of the genesis of a novel about the ‘Seymour Tapes’ enables the portrait of Alex Seymour to carry inside it traces of the portraitist Tim Lott. But those traces point away from the empirical author who is simultaneously invoked and misrecognized as such by the fiction. In an extraordinary shift in narrative focalization, the section of The Seymour Tapes titled ‘The End’ ceases to be narrated by the character ‘Tim Lott’, and is narrated instead by the ‘voice’ of the surveillance cameras. This means that the distinction between Lott and ‘Lott’ is solidified by the apparatus of surveillance itself. It is hard to imagine a more suitable device for imagining the fictive creation of a self-​portrait –​of the other.

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Julian Barnes’s self-​portrait as other Even more than Tim Lott, Julian Barnes is an author known for experimenting with the author function. His self-​confessed breakthrough novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) employed the apparently straightforward technique of fictive autobiography in its narrative of Geoffrey Braithwaite’s response to his wife’s death and whimsical compensatory attempts to track down a stuffed parrot that once belonged to Gustave Flaubert. Because there is no way of verifying which among many is the ‘genuine’ parrot, the novel is characterized by such typically postmodern elements as irony, nonlinearity, a critique of instrumental knowledge and a sense of playfulness –​even at the reader’s expense. Nicola Evans takes a slightly more unusual approach to interpreting the text. Drawing on Said’s early research on literary careers, she sees it instead as ‘undoing the dichotomy between writing and life by enacting a form of live writing, redistributing the qualities of life between humans and object as though to remind us that one can be dead without ceasing to breathe’.23 That is, where a theorist like Booth sees the many different roles and activities in which an author is involved as squarely conflicting with the physical activity of writing, Evans argues that in Flaubert’s Parrot the writer Braithwaite is most alive as writer when he is writing, even if the things he writes about are inanimate or even dead. To Evans, therefore, writing is not a departure from a life lived elsewhere but a logical extension of it. Another of the material elements that Said associates with the development of a literary career is the creation by the writer of a discernible characteristic idiom. Indeed, one of the means by which Flaubert’s Parrot mocks its readers is through the use of narrating voice. Although there are a few instances where the narrative reminds its readers that the ‘I’ narrating it is the first-​person homo-​ diegetic narrator Braithwaite, these are so few and so sparse that they make us sometimes forget about Braithwaite and create instead the impression of a ‘real’ speaking voice, implicitly Barnes’s own. This impression of authenticity is achieved through a downplaying of the fictitiousness of the fictive character, and is further developed by the fact that Braithwaite’s narrating voice in Flaubert’s Parrot bears the linguistic fingerprints that in his nonfiction we would associate with Barnes himself. That is to say, the tone, rhythm, vocabulary, syntax and sentence structure appended to Braithwaite in the novel are the same tones, rhythm, vocabulary and idiom that we can identify with Barnes outside it. After Flaubert’s Parrot, Barnes’s experimentation with the author function was continued in his next two novels. Staring at the Sun (1986) started in rural

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England just before the Second World War and went up to the year 2020, imagining the time when the ‘present’ as he knew it would have become past. This structure gave it an in-​built obsolescence and implied a potential loss of futurity. A similar idea was presented in a different way in A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters (1989), where the whole of world history was conceived of as comprising nine fables which were ironically held together by means of a metafictive ‘half chapter’ in which the narrator drew attention to the impossibility of holding such grand narratives together in the first place. In the final section of A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters an unnamed narrator, who shares some of the same biographical life history as the ‘real’ Julian Barnes, dreams of dying and entering a secular afterlife. It is heaven conceived of as a consumerist theme park, with a Scandinavian hostess Brigitta, whose role is to fulfil all the dreamer’s desires, including sexual desires. But after several centuries of carnal pleasure, unrestricted sexual fantasy, world travel and meeting with interesting historical figures, the capacity of the dreamer to imagine wanting anything else begins to decline: ‘After a while, getting what you want all the time is very close to not getting what you want all the time.’24 Bored with heaven, he thus chooses to die –​and wakes up from the dream. It is an ironic representation of the future in which the author portrays himself as other. The implicit decline of remaining future time was partly the subject of Barnes’s subsequent short story collection The Lemon Table (2004), a series of stories linked by the theme of ageing. But to explore artistic responses to the apprehension of approaching death more specifically, he turned to nonfiction. Nothing to Be Frightened of (2008) is about the decline in religious sensibility in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries and about the capacity –​or otherwise –​for art to compensate for the loss of belief in an afterlife. In it Barnes examines how numerous (secular) writers and artists over the last hundred and fifty years have responded to this loss in their art: Stendhal, Zola, Daudet, Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, Somerset Maugham, Arthur Koestler, Rossini, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Sibelius, Shostakovich. In other words, Nothing to Be Frightened of is partly a survey –​though not a theoretical study –​of various kinds of late-​career ‘fictions’, written in the knowledge of approaching death, including to some extent Barnes’s own. This means that there are also several instances of authorial retrospection. Nothing to Be Frightened of is about different kinds of belatedness: historical, spiritual, artistic and even familial. Barnes’s exploration of different cultural and artistic responses to the nonavailability of a hereafter gives rise to a description of a secular modern heaven that closely resembles that imagined by his fictive dreamer ‘Barnes’ in A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters.

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It too has a hotel, a gym and a stylish Swedish friend with a soothing voice saying:  ‘It’s time to let go.’25 But there is an important difference. The earlier novels had posited the presence of the novelist in works where we knew him to be absent. This later work reintroduces the presence of the author but with a different kind of irony. Barnes is present as novelist but in a work which is not a novel. In other words, Nothing to Be Frightened of employs the same dynamic interplay between real and fictive authorial selves as the earlier novels, but from the other direction. One of the striking characteristics of Barnes’s prose in Nothing to Be Frightened of is that its tone and rhythm feel strongly consistent with the voice of the fictional authors in those earlier works. For instance, he writes of how he felt pipped at the post when the poet D. J. Enright published certain ideas about the relationship between death and the artist that (Barnes claims) he had already started to develop independently. Of course, the modulation between fictive and authentic selves that is mobilized across all Barnes’s work necessitates a certain critical scepticism of the claim itself. At a stylistic level, however, there is a continuity of voice with the earlier fictional works and the later nonfictional: You may have noted –​may even have pitied –​the vehemence with which I wrote ‘But I said that first.’ I, the insistent, emphatic, italicized me. The I to which I am brutally attached, the I that must be farewelled. And yet this I, or even its daily unitalicized shadow, is not what I think of it as.26

The distinction between I and ‘I’, like the distinction between Lott and ‘Lott’, is Barnes’s way of keeping different authorial selves in play on the one hand, while also registering a certain temporal discontinuity in those selves on the other. Is the ‘I’ of Flaubert’s Parrot the same I as the ‘I’ of Nothing to Be Frightened of? They speak in the same voice and yet the propositional content of what is spoken militates against too easy a conflation of one with the other. Perhaps because of his imbrication of the empirical ‘I’ with the fictive, Barnes goes on to suggest that he would expect anyone dying to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful is often not the same as what is true, and to someone dying, what feels useful is the fiction that one has led a useful life. But the Barnes that speaks to us from the pages of Nothing to Be Frightened of is not dying, and the ‘Barnes’ that is narrated is subject to as much of a sense of renewal and reinvention as of decline. There is a particularly cruel irony in this sense of how death makes unreliable narrators of us all. 2008, the year Nothing to Be Frightened of was published, was also the year Barnes’s wife Pat Kavanagh was diagnosed with cancer and died.

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After The Sense of an Ending (2011), his next book Levels of Life (2013) is less about the approach of death than its aftermath, in grieving. Like Nothing to be Frightened of, Levels of Life is partly about the capacity or otherwise of art to provide consolation for the impossibility of reaching heaven in a modern, secular world. Since what is being consoled is now Barnes’s own experience of becoming a widower, it also has a less provisional stance. Two short chapters use examples of the history of hot air ballooning as resonant metaphors for how belief in heaven started to wane during the nineteenth century when man first took to the skies (which had also been a theme of A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters). The much longer third part, ‘The Loss of Depth’, is then more directly about how Kavanagh’s death caused him to experience empirically what he had discussed hypothetically in Nothing to Be Frightened of: the fact that belief in an afterlife is no longer available to console us. He thus struggles to find other consolations by turning his experiences into narratives. Chapter 7 will argue that when used by a novelist, the most appropriate term for this technique is autofiction. For now it is enough to say that the consolation provided by self-​narration has a particularly strong congruence with the narrative method employed in portraiture. Levels of Life portrays the attempt to generate symbolic consolation for a deeply felt loss through narrative. Barnes achieves this consolation by measuring his empirical experience as a widower against his fictional portrayal of a widower decades earlier in Flaubert’s Parrot: My fictional widower had a different life  –​and love  –​from mine, and quite a different widowing. But I had to suppress just a few words in one sentence, and was surprised at what I took to be my accuracy. Only later did the novelist’s self-​doubt set in:  perhaps, rather than inventing the correct grief for my fictional character, I had merely been predicting my own probable feelings –​an easier job.27

That authors draw on their own experience in creating fictional worlds is a literary commonplace. What is more notable here is that Barnes does the opposite, drawing on his earlier fiction to frame the real experience. There is an ironic sense of the author aligning himself with the character he had created almost thirty years earlier, as if the fictive portrayal of mourning is retrospectively rendered more authentic by the intervention of lived experience that ironically confirms it. It is, however, a trick that can only work once. Flaubert’s Parrot cultivates a feeling of the presence of the novelist who is not really there. As scrupulous literary scholars we may remind ourselves that the voice of the character is not to be

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taken as the authentic voice of the author and deny the text had ever deceived us. When the later works of nonfiction again indicate the presence of the author, we might say: ‘Once bitten, twice shy’, and again refuse to identify the author’s voice with that of a fictional character. In other words, the voice of Julian Barnes that we apprehend when reading Nothing to Be Frightened of and Levels of Life has so many of the qualities of the voice of the narrating character of the earlier novel that the nonfiction comes to feel as though it is likewise fictive. In this way the portraits feel like portraits of a character even while they are constructed as portraits of their author. This means that unlike Lott’s self-​portrait of the other, Barnes’s representation of his authorial self emerges across his career as a whole and is better considered a self-​portrait as other. Or to put it another way, whereas Lott used the form of portraiture associated above with career construction and behaved like a confidant, Barnes uses a form of portraiture more typical of social science research. Unlike most novelists, he ostensibly behaves like a novelist by making visible the different material components of his career that are normally concealed.

Shūsaku Endō’s self-​portrait by the other In contrast to Lott’s self-​portrait of the other and Barnes’s self-​portrait as other, Japanese author Shūsaku Endō’s penultimate novel Scandal (1986) can more appropriately be considered a self-​portrait in which the novelist is estranged by its other. Its protagonist Suguro is a sixty-​five-​year-​old author and practising Christian whose published works ‘The Voice of Silence’, ‘In the Wilderness’ and ‘The Emissary’ indicate an apparent correspondence to Endō’s own Silence (1966), Volcano (1960) and The Samurai (1980) at the titular and possibly thematic level. In the portrayal of a provisional fictional avatar, Endō allows himself to become critically displaced, wilfully supplanted in his role as novelist by the figure he created. This displacement establishes a critical distance between the author and his work that in turn gives rise to an externalization and outward projection of the themes we associate with Endō onto the figure of the other, where they can be critically scrutinized. The major themes of Endō’s work can be described as religious faith, a crisis in spirituality and the human pressures that result when faith comes into conflict with its absence. In Silence (1966) and The Samurai (1980) that conflict was projected backwards into the seventeenth century when Christianity was forbidden in Japan on pain of death. The protagonists in both cases are very much like the whisky priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

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(1940) during the Mexican anti-​clerical purges. They are under severe pressure to recant their religion in order to survive, but cannot do so without reconciling the act of apostasy with a private sense of what they believe. The pain of apostasy has to feel as great as the pain of physical torture, or there is no dilemma. In other words, they do not simply abandon their religion in the face of torture; the great tension of the novels is effective because readers feel that the apparently simple gesture of making a public renunciation really matters to the priests at a fundamental level. Silence (1966) and The Samurai (1980) are generally taken to be Endō’s major works, in part because the depth of conflict they convey is so powerful and complex.28 This power contrasts with the works of an earlier stage in Endō’s career (Wonderful Fool, 1959; Volcano, 1960), where the crisis in spirituality was located in the period of Japan’s postwar reconstruction. In those novels, there is no spiritual meaning in the societies at all. The precarious and embattled faith that would later come in Silence and The Samurai was absent so that the early novels could not portray a crisis in it. They became instead concerned with the search for meaning in a society devoid of spirituality, which, though a powerful theme, was less visceral than the torturous experiences portrayed by the conflict in the major novels. In Scandal (1986) something happens that is different again. The scandal of the title is portrayed as a different kind of crisis in conscience for the Christian novelist Suguro. The priests of Silence and The Samurai reflect on their own dilemmas and allegiances in a mainly introspective way, affording a great contrast to the physical action that is projected outwards and of which they are mostly the object, even the victim. In Scandal, rather than a commitment to introspection as an intrinsic component of faith that we find in those prior novels, the exploration of inner motivation is brought about from the outside and much more stringently. Suguro is accused by the journalist Kobari of visiting pleasure quarters and prostitutes and hence of being a hypocrite for promoting religious virtue in his novels. Suguro refutes the charge of hypocrisy, arguing that he has never written in direct service of any Christian cause, which he therefore cannot be accused of having betrayed. In this confrontation, which lasts for the entirety on the novel, Endō uses his fictional avatar to explore how far his Christian vision has compromised or limited his art as a novelist; and vice versa. Thus the themes of the earlier work carry through, but become themselves opened up to interrogation and critique. By allowing himself to be estranged by his own other, Endō is thus able to incorporate into his portrait a voice that strikes a note of dissonance with the voice that readers of his earlier novels recognize as his own.

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Sara Lawrence-​Lightfoot refers to the expression in narrative portraits of important but contradictory elements as ‘deviant’ voices.29 They contrast with the potential categorization of diverse themes into a single overarching meta-​ narrative, which is a process she refers to as ‘naming convergence’.30 This is a term that is particularly apt in Endō’s case, where it can be used to imply two different meanings: the convergence of different names, and the name of the process whereby different themes converge. The character Suguro tells his agent his last work will be called ‘Scandal’, but this work never materializes in the novel. That is, the novel Scandal posits a fictive work that shares its name but which is never written, it is merely written about. The title is thus a metonym for itself, in which two different names, which happen to be the same name, converge. These two names, that are also the same name, refer to different objects: one to the physical novel in the reader’s hand, and the other to a set of real concerns and questions embodied in the oeuvre of its imaginary author. Presenting a version of himself who looks quite like him but who is nevertheless discernibly different from him enables Endō to achieve a form of critical separation and distance for the exploration of those questions about his position in his life and work. To answer them, he delves into an area not commonly visited in his work: sexuality. In order to refute the suggestion of sexual promiscuity Suguro visits Tokyo’s red light district and challenges two female street artists who have painted a portrait depicting the horror and rottenness in his soul: Naruse is a volunteer at the hospital and Motoko is interested in sexual experimentation, especially sado-​masochism. In fact, Motoko ends up killing herself in a hotel room for the sublime ecstasy of the final moment. Meanwhile Naruse tells Suguro that her now-​dead husband was based in China during the Second World War, and that she herself had used his tales of inflicting atrocity on women and children to achieve sexual arousal. Sexuality is therefore associated with cruelty and violence in a much harsher and more explicit way than in Silence and The Samurai. There, sexuality was mainly portrayed as part of the wider conflict the novels represented, between faith and persecution. It was registered as a tension between the priests’ desire for sexual freedom and the conflicting desire to uphold church doctrine, but mainly as a background detail. In Scandal, by contrast, sexual violence and its tension with conventional morality are foregrounded in a way that feels uncomfortable for readers. The novel thus evinces the raw, un-​ accommodated, demanding style that Said associates with late works.31 The form of Endō’s Scandal is difficult for its audience to accept, departing from a surface realism and undergoing an unexpected transition into troubling metaphysics. Suguro initially claims that someone must be visiting the red light district

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disguised as him to create the scandal. When he is left in a hotel room with the teenaged girl Mitsu, he admits to himself that he has defiled her, even though he only seems to be an observer, rather than a participant, in what takes place there. It is an odd and discordant shift, leaving unclear whether there is real guilt attached to his actions precisely because in the impressionistic portrayal it is unclear exactly what he has done. By the end of the novel, he has likewise recognized the imposter visiting the pleasure quarters as himself, again leaving unsettled the question of whether his guilt is of a criminal, moral or wider metaphorical order. It is an unusual kind of metaphysic, one that challenges readers to reconcile two different versions of the character in a way that is not possible if the book is read as a mere realist novel. That is, the novel embodies a formal transformation from realism to metaphysics that echoes the stylistic difficulty it creates for its readers, and that contrasts with the pervasive aspirituality that Endō appears to have associated with contemporary Japanese society.32 This is the final recognition of the novel. Far from the accusation levelled at Suguro early on that he has tried to use his novels to exert an influence on society, it is tantamount to a recognition by Endō that his have had none. It is a realization that could perhaps only come from an author retrospectively looking back at his career and portraying that process in a fictional self-​portrait in which the author is estranged by its own other.

Notes 1 Sara Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, The Art and Science of Portraiture (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-​Bass, 1997), p. 29. 2 See Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-​Up of Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 49. 3 Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Davis, Portraiture, p. 32. 4 Ibid., p. 177. 5 Ibid., p. 34. 6 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 186–​89. 7 Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Davis, Portraiture, p. 30. 8 Ibid., p. 31. 9 Savickas, ‘Constructing Careers’, p. 179. 10 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 42. 11 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 46. 12 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 45. 13 Said, On Late Style, pp. 39–​40.

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14 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 15. 15 Pavlíčková, ‘Bringing the Author Back’, p. 36. 16 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 63. 17 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 282. 18 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 70. 19 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 66. 20 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 115. 21 Tim Lott, The Seymour Tapes (London: Viking, 2005), p. 1. 22 Ibid., p. 167. 23 Nicola Evans, ‘Inside the Writer’s Room, the Artist’s Studio and Flaubert’s Parrot’, in Literary Careers in the Modern Era, ed. Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 181. 24 Barnes, A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters (London: Picador, 1989), p. 309. 25 Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 114. 26 Ibid., pp. 149–​50. 27 Barnes, Levels of Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013), p. 115. 28 See Mark B. Williams, Endō Shūsaku: A Literature of Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 136. 29 Lawrence-​Lightfoot and Davis, Portraiture, p. 193. 30 Ibid., p. 231. 31 Said, On Late Style, p. 9. 32 See William Johnston, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Endō Shūsaku, Silence (London: Peter Owen, 1996), pp. 1–​18.

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Intimate Paratexts

The previous chapter explored three different responses to the theoretical challenge that arises when the empirical author of a material book is rendered either fictive or imaginary. These responses can be characterized briefly as: (1) the real author shares a name with the fictional author, (2) the real novel shares a title with the posited fictive novel, and (3) the oeuvre of the real author shares a set of interests and preoccupations with the oeuvre of the fictive author. The chapter argued that work by Lott, Barnes and Endō evinces various combinations of these possibilities, producing different kinds of self-​portraits. Chapter 4 will advance the idea of self-​portraiture in a new direction using Kobus Maree’s concept of triangulation and Gerard Genette’s category of intimate paratexts. In career construction theory, triangulation refers to a practice whereby clients in counselling test the validity of different narratives by measuring them against each other. The different narratives often address different experiences at different moments or periods during the course of the person’s life, so that what is really tested in the process of triangulation is what has changed and what has remained constant. Since Genette uses the term intimate paratext to refer to a specific form of paratext in which a writer addresses himself, the category can be used to identify variations and continuities in a given author’s work over time. Thus I will argue that the category of the intimate paratext brings explicitly into the field of authorial career research what the concept of triangulation suggests is true of careers in general. The chapter will argue that the method Genette employs in Paratexts is one of scientific classification: identifying as many potential varieties of paratext as possible at the theoretical level, and then searching for examples of each. His distinction of various kinds of authorial ‘prefaces’ is a case in point. He starts not with a series of textual objects to be analysed, but with a series of abstract theoretical categories that are essentially content-​less. Certain textual objects are

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then assigned to as many of the empty categories as possible but in Genette’s account many of them remain empty. In drawing on Maree’s notion of triangulation to address the under-​ conceptualization of the category of intimate paratexts, the chapter will argue that a prior novel by a given author can often be considered a preface for a later novel by the same author because it lays down a threshold of interpretation for it. Putting this the other way around, the chapter will argue that with regard to the earlier novel the later can be seen as an intimate paratext: a text in which a given author ‘addresses’ himself/​herself by revisiting his or her own earlier work. In a discussion of A. S. Byatt’s Children’s Book (2009), V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds (2004) and Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012) the chapter will argue that each novel can be seen as an ‘intimate’ paratext in this sense. Finally, drawing on the argument of Monika Fludernik in The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction I  will suggest that both in career construction practice and in the writing of fiction, it is important to distinguish between the representation of a subject on the one hand and the creation (or evocation) of subjectivity on the other. Fludernik’s ideas about the evocation of speech and consciousness are highly relevant to a discussion of fictions of self-​ retrospect because she considers the tactical and schematic decisions made by authors in the creation of a fictive consciousness in new ways.

Triangulation and narratability The definition of fictions of self-​retrospect that has been developed over the previous three chapters has made it necessary to extend Peter Rabinowitz’s concept of the authorial audience. Chapter 2 argued that although Rabinowitz used this notion to refer to a potential reader for whom an author imagines himself to be writing, it could also be rearticulated as a means by which the author ultimately considers his own role in his work. In other words, the authorial audience is more of a theoretical concept for thinking about qualities of authorship than it is an empirical construct for studying the behaviours of the reader. It suggests that identifying different hypothetical moments of interaction between the author and his other creates opportunities for the author to reimagine himself as such. Because the author’s other is his reader, there are three different potential instances of symbolic interaction in play: that between author and reader, that between reader and author and that between author and reader again at which point a new authorial self emerges when compared to the first instance.

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This interaction between self and other is the basis of Peter McIlveen’s notion of the dialogic self. Chapters 2 and 3 started to explore how it could be applied to the field of author research. This chapter will expand that application by showing how the three-​fold interaction of the dialogic self with an environment is better understood as a process of triangulation. Triangulation is a practice of critical reflection in which counsellors and their clients contrast an existing problematic state of affairs with two or more alternatives in order critically to evaluate them and make a judgement on which course to follow. Since career construction employs a discursive method, each alternative is conceptualized as a narrative in which the client is both character and author, developing a new chapter in his or her career life story. This means that the practice of triangulation can also then be used to inform our understanding of authorial careers. In Counselling for Career Construction: Connecting Life Themes to Construct Life Portraits, Jakobus (or Kobus) Maree distinguishes between three different kinds of self-​reflection. These can briefly be labelled reflection on action, reflection in action and reflection for action.1 By definition, reflection on action can only ever take place after an initial event, typically an unsuccessful project of some kind, so that it is often associated with the search for remedial activity and correction of error. The deeper reflexivity suggested by reflection in action retains an element of this belated self-​examination but is also open-​ended and ongoing rather than merely concerned with correcting a past mistake. Reflection for action is more proactive again, and need not depend on an initial failure to galvanize the dialogic self into future action. This is why Savickas says that many of the most important topics of self-​reflection ‘may not properly be called problems’.2 By drawing attention to these different kinds of reflexivity, Maree encourages his clients to reflect both on their actions and career roles, and on the qualitative worth of those actions to themselves. Identifying commonly recurring themes in a person’s narrative history reveals the values and desires that are of most importance to him, thereby giving rise to a new narrative of self based on the interplay of continuity and difference in his sense of self over time. As discussed in Chapter 1, this would typically be achieved through a career interview. Maree uses the term narratability to refer to the elucidation of a new self-​concept during the course of a career interview. Narratability, or the ability to narrate a career life story, endows what would otherwise be a mere list of roles or tasks with deeper significance and meaning.3 One implication of this is that a career interview presupposes that clients arrive with the intention to make new meaning for themselves and to use that meaning to direct future career actions. This means

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that intentionality should really be seen as the starting point for career counselling.4 It is also why meta-​reflection is one of the most fundamental concepts in career construction theory: meta-​reflection enables clients to learn from the past and direct themselves in the future by ‘authoring’ their own new life stories. In common with Mark Savickas, Maree suggests that often the richest sources of meaning and significance in clients’ self-​narratives are their early recollections. This means that the role (and distorting effect) of memory have to be considered during a career interview. But Maree argues that checking the reliability of a client’s recollection is less important than (a)  what the client has chosen to discuss, and (b) what meaning the client attaches to that memory. Both of these sources of narrative material are accessible whether or not the memory of the incident can be verified for accuracy at the factual level. This points to career construction as a combination of discovering latent values and meanings, and creating a wider continuity between them. It is a process that involves both counsellor and client in a practice of co-​creation and joint authorship of the client’s new narrative. All of this suggests that a certain degree of testing theoretical hypotheses is necessary in the career construction interview. This testing is what Maree means by triangulation. It need not take the form of checking facts for accuracy, but addresses instead the qualitative nature of the meanings each person associates with them in order to envisage potential new roles in the future. Or to put it another way, triangulation refers less to the confirmation of factual information and more to the identification of different potential subject positions. For this reason, the early recollections component of a career interview typically comprises three different memories in order for the client to be able to identify recurring patterns and write a narrative between and beyond them. Fewer than this and it would become difficult for the counsellor to discern a recurring pattern and so assist in the process of co-​authoring past and future narratives of the client’s self. More than this and the narratives are likely to obstruct rather than support each other. Larry Cochran states this succinctly by saying that there must not be so many concerns that the counsellor is overwhelmed and slides into chaos; or so few that the counsellor mistakes a part for the whole.5 By drawing on three different recollections and testing them empirically to verify what is of fundamental importance to a client’s self-​concept and what is minor or even damaging to that concept, the career interview triangulates three different potential subject positions and enables the client to test the value of each against the others. Counsellors use this technique to develop qualitative interpretations of the rich narrative data supplied to them by the client in

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the interview when these seem to contradict each other. It is a means of testing hypotheses and tentatively developing a narrative of the client’s self by asking whether or not the client recognizes himself in the narrative portrait the counsellor develops of him. Through this means, certain ideas are validated and incorporated into the portrait and others are edited and amended or simply rejected. The portrait becomes a meaningful tool through which the client narrates past selves in order to identify possible future selves and so convert intentionality into practical action. Much of Maree’s work consists of case studies that illustrate the practice of narratability and triangulation. For example, his case study of Janie is about an eighteen-​year-​old woman who had been bullied over her appearance and considered having breast reduction surgery.6 In her career interview she expressed uncertainty over what to study at university and what career to aim for. Maree mentions that her favourite television programme was Gray’s Anatomy and her favourite author was Stephen King. But it was not clear what specifically about King’s work she liked. It could have been the thrill-​seeking content, the style of writing, his real or perceived degree of originality, the successful financial management of his career and so on. Moreover, it could have been extrinsic factors such as his public persona; the fact that he never gave up on his ambition to become a writer despite early years of rejection; the fighting spirit he demonstrated after being injured in a serious car crash. Specifying what it is that attracts the client to either the recollection (or in this case the chosen role model) makes a significant difference in developing a life history. These things could only be tested at the level of propositional content through a practice of triangulation, which revealed that what Janie liked about Stephen King was that he had donated money to several charities, including a hospital foundation. This made it possible to identify the hospital as a common element in all her stories, and helping others as her life theme. Using narratability to turn intention into action led her to study medicine so that when healing others she would also complete herself. The final point about triangulation in practice is that it is as applicable to the position and development of the counsellor as it is to the desires and values of the client. Indeed, career construction strongly emphasizes the constitutive presence of the counsellor in the counselling relationship and hence the potential for mutual change. At the conclusion of his study Counselling for Career Construction, Maree advises new career counselling practitioners with little experience in the field to try the narrative method in workshops before bringing it straight to their own clients. This is not merely to bolster the confidence of newly qualified counsellors, but also has the advantage that practitioners have

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the opportunity to revise and scrutinize their methods in order to ‘re-​invigorate their own careers and life stories’.7 In other words, career construction as a narrative method requires its practitioners to subject themselves to their own methods of meta-​reflection.

Triangulating the career of A. S. Byatt The central argument of this book is that career construction as a theory of authorship has the same implication for authors as meta-​reflection has with regard to career counselling. Chapter 2 illustrated three different moments in the authorial career of Graham Swift to show how at each different stage the author creates and occupies a different subject position as author. The new concept of triangulation as a means of identifying those different positions and testing them against each other can be used to interpret the career of another novelist, A.  S. Byatt. At each iteration, Byatt’s work returns to and re-​invokes prior work and hence prior versions of Byatt’s authorial self, not so much by competing with them but by re-​presenting them. Byatt’s early novel The Game (1967) is about a female Oxford Don struggling to launch a writing career. Only when a crisis in Julia’s relationships with Cassandra, Thor and Simon reaches a critical phase is she able to develop a really new kind of writing. Even then, she fears they will resent her for using their lives as raw material for her fiction. This might be seen as a moral dilemma for Byatt herself at the early stage of her career –​especially in Byatt’s well-​publicized feud with her novelist sister Margaret Drabble.8 For Julia, as for Byatt, there is an almost impossible tension at work between the vocation of the writer to create, and a potentially weakening desire not to alienate those close to the writer. At the end of The Game, the fictional novelist Julia begins to garner critical success. However, this comes at the cost of Cassandra’s suicide, and Simon warns Julia that each of us is drawn to the continuous symbolic repetition of one vocational action. In Julia’s case, this repeated action can be identified with the act of writing, and with the repetition of emotions associated with that experience. What we find is the use of autobiographical elements to enable an innovative career in writing, along with a sense of anguish over the validity of using other lives in such a way and hence also an internal questioning of the vocation of the writer. As Robert McGill puts it, ‘The Game insists that the writing of autobiographical fiction gains an impetus as well as ethical complications of intersubjectivity that begin in early family life.’9

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Outside The Game, this thematic nexus of autobiography with internal self-​ questioning is also a recurring, repeated vocational action of the ‘real’ novelist A. S. Byatt. Her most celebrated novel Possession (1990) is lauded as a typical example of historiographic metafiction because it foregrounds the presence of the author in the narrative and so converts the internal self-​questioning of the earlier novel into a new innovative narrative technique. Regina Rudaityté has even argued that all the metafictive strategies of the text seem to ‘backfire, as if in fact Byatt seems to be trying to restore the author back to the text, displaying her belief in individual creativity against the anonymity advocated by poststructuralist theories’.10 But what do we find in Byatt’s more recent novel, The Children’s Book (2009)? The novel is not metafictive in the same way that Possession was; and in turn Possession did not question the validity of the role of the author in the same way that The Game did. The new technique that Byatt has added during the latter stages of her career in The Children’s Book draws on the resources that are already available and already existing –​that is, her own earlier work. But as with Swift’s most recent novel, something different breaks through: a kind of fictional displacement of the very themes and techniques for which she had become known into history. The protagonist of The Children’s Book is not simply a writer –​like Byatt herself, and many of her previous protagonists. She is also a storyteller, passing stories on to a new generation of children, in a different historical period from our own. The autobiographical element was quite strong in The Game, and was developed into the technique of metafiction in Possession –​which both consciously relate to the present tense and contemporary life situation of Byatt herself. By contrast, The Children’s Book displaces that critical self-​questioning of the role of the author into the early years of the twentieth century so that the autobiographical element is necessarily underplayed. Yet in the figure of a protagonist who is also a storyteller we find both thematic continuity with the earlier novels, and a departure from the themes and techniques of those novels –​which Byatt can be said to have visited again as if for the first time. Using the technique of triangulation makes it possible to identify these different stages in Byatt’s career and the different subject positions constructed for the author of her fiction at each stage.

Intimate paratexts It should now be clear that fictions of self-​retrospect are created when a given author enters into a fertile dialogue with herself, which is to say, with her work.

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The utility of applying Maree’s practice of triangulation to fictions of self-​ retrospect is that it identifies two or more narratives out of which the author of those narratives is constructed as such, thereby reconciling change and continuity in the construction of the author over time. Thus the A. S. Byatt who is the author of Possession is the same human being as the A. S. Byatt who is the author of The Game, but the impression of an author evinced by each text is slightly different. The author constructed by The Children’s Book is different again. Gerard Genette refers to a text in which an author addresses her presence in her own work in either a factual or metaphorical way as an intimate paratext. He first introduced this concept in his theoretical study Paratexts (1987; English translation 1997), a critical survey in which he sought to classify different material elements on the threshold between the text and the interpretative community outside it. Initially in Paratexts Genette distinguishes between peritexts and epitexts, or between elements such as contents pages, titles, dedications, epigraphs, footnotes and indexes that can be considered in the text but not quite of the text; and those that strictly speaking exist outside the text but nevertheless inform its reception (such as reviews, preparatory studies, journals of work in progress and so on). He then divides epitexts into public and private epitexts, arguing that private epitexts are addressed to one or more specific addressees so that the reading ‘public’ can only ever hear the private epitext over the shoulder of the specific addressee: not so much hearing it, as overhearing it. Because it implies (if only metaphorically) a physical closeness between sender, listener and overhearer, the private epitext can be further subdivided into confidential epitexts (written to a specific confidant or colleague) and intimate epitexts (in which the author addresses himself). To put this another way, Genette uses the term ‘intimate’ paratext when writing about the addressee of a text even in cases where the text ostensibly lacks an addressee and is given rather towards authorial introspection. The intimate paratext is the one the author addresses to himself, sometimes through the workaday materials associated with the business of being an author such as diaries, journals and research notes, and sometimes by developing a new portrait of himself in fiction. This iterative process has the effect of relativizing our notions of completion and finality: ‘the work and the oeuvre are always to a greater or lesser extent in progress’ and ‘the cessation of this labour, like death itself, is always to some degree accidental’.11 Genette’s method in Paratexts is of an inductive (as opposed to deductive) scientific nature. It is a form of classification that starts by identifying as many different varieties of paratext as possible at the theoretical level, and then searching

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for examples of texts (primarily, though not exclusively, fictional) which instantiate each variety. In other words, the method behind Paratexts is based not so much on the observation of known textual phenomena as on the creation of theoretically postulated categories for which observable textual examples may or may not exist in practice. Having set up all those categories he then uses them for two different purposes. One is to classify the examples of paratexts he has observed during the course of his reading and research. The other is to make predictions by way of scientific hypotheses for kinds of textual paratexts that could exist in theory without his having identified particular examples of them in practice. In turn, the undiscovered examples might be undiscovered because they exist only in texts with which he is unfamiliar, or because no such examples have yet been written. This approach to paratexts leaves both the overall classification and some of the individual categories within it radically incomplete. When talking about titles, for instance, Genette uses the terms thematic and rhematic to classify different kinds of titles. Thematic titles refer to the subject matter of the work, but not necessarily to the work itself. Rhematic titles, by contrast, refer directly to the text by name, even if the name has no obvious bearing on the content. Genette himself is unable to adduce any concrete examples of the distinction between thematic and rhematic titles and so, although he classifies the concepts in theory, he leaves the categories analytically empty. In this way, Paratexts issues an open challenge to other researchers to fill the open categories it identifies. For example, the concepts of thematic and rhematic titles can be illustrated by the novels discussed in the previous chapter. The Seymour Tapes is the title of a novel about the writing of a fictive novel about the so-​called ‘Seymour Tapes’ and hence can be considered thematic. Endō’s Scandal is about the writing of a fictive text that is directly titled Scandal and hence is more properly considered rhematic. The method of predicting theoretically possible combinations of textual features –​even if Genette knows of no example of them –​arises again in the section of Paratexts when he discusses authorial dedications. He suggests, for example, that he could imagine a composite work being published in stages in the form of separate individual volumes, which may have their own separate dedicatees, before the publication of the overall whole, which may be dedicated to somebody else. Again, however, he says he knows no examples of this happening in practice and the subcategory remains unfilled. A third example is Genette’s classification of different kinds of authorial footnotes, which he divides into the categories of original, later or delayed notes. An original set of footnotes are ones included in the first published edition of a

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given text; later footnotes may not appear until a later edition (although if they were by the same author as the text as a whole Genette would also consider them ‘original’); and delayed footnotes are added by a separate author or editor to a delayed or subsequent republication of a single work. Of these, the function of later footnotes is most apposite to a consideration of fictions of self-​retrospect since their purpose is to enable the author to review one’s past –​part-​critically, part with compassion for the authorial self. ‘In short, if the child, as we know, is father to the man, reciprocally it is as a father that the adult judges the child he was’.12 In other words, later footnotes do not only explain a work for the benefit of the reader, they also have the secondary function of justifying what the author has done and the tertiary function of providing critical commentary, each of which is more for the benefit of the author. Such notes enable the author to be critically severe on himself while also asserting that the early work laid down the essence of all his later work. Even when discussing footnotes, though, Genette is forced to admit that there are some theoretical possibilities for which he knows no examples at all. Apocryphal notes are one such kind, and there is also the question of degree: a primary text being quoted complete with its notes in a secondary text, which hence hits the reader only on the rebound. Though Genette gives no clear example, this would happen if a writer of fiction quoted scholarly sources complete with notes in a fictional text. In fact the ‘fictive’ note is something of a staple of postmodern experimental fiction. A.  S. Byatt uses it extensively in Possession to flag up the interplay between different story worlds: one about her fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, author of a narrative poem of Norse mythology, Ragnarök, and the other about scholars researching Ash’s life and work in the present. Moreover, in 2011 Byatt published a novel titled Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Since the earlier poem of the same name exists only in the fragments that are ostensibly ‘excerpted’ in Possession, it is impossible to say for certain whether this is a case of two books sharing a common title at the thematic or merely rhematic level. To the extent that Byatt uses the ‘real’ 2011 novel belatedly to ratify and affirm her status as inaugurator of the fictive text she had already imagined in 1990, she performs the same movement as Julian Barnes in Nothing to Be Frightened of. That is, she retrospectively uses the earlier fiction to frame her subsequent experiences as author. To the extent that she uses the latter text to align herself with the fictitious author of the earlier, she performs the same gesture as Tim Lott: the semi-​fictionalization of the authorial self. But since the author of the first Ragnarök, Ash, is an invention of Byatt herself, it seems less meaningful to question the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ authors or between ‘real’

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and ‘fictitious’ books than it does to compare the different levels of narrative consciousness evoked by each. Those different levels have the effect of enabling Byatt to practise a form of authorship in the second degree, or authorship on the rebound, in the way theorized by Genette. Because Genette starts with the abstract categories of different kinds of paratexts rather than with primary texts, his method in Paratexts tends towards an aesthetic of incompletion:  it inevitably fails both to define all of the possible kinds of paratexts, and to identify textual examples of each. This is one reason why the ideas developed in Paratexts are worth considering in a discussion of authorial careers, since those careers too are often fundamentally unfinished. Writing, if it is a profession at all, is a profession from which few people consciously retire. As Roger Grenier puts it, ‘[f]‌ew writers have willingly put their last word to paper’.13 There is, however, a second reason why it is worth bringing Genette’s ideas about paratexts into the domain of author research, which is that his discussion of paratexts provides a way of theorizing an author’s capacity or otherwise to enter into creative dialogue with himself –​which in this case means with his work. This capacity is identified in Paratexts in Genette’s lengthy consideration of prefaces, which seem to occupy a special place in his thinking because his discussion of different kinds of prefaces occupies more than half of the entire book. Moreover, the different categories of prefaces he sets up have important implications for how paratexts serve as thresholds for the text –​primarily by setting up different expectations of the author. As with footnotes, prefaces can be categorized as original, later or delayed. A delayed preface has a potential autobiographical function, but the extent to which it is delayed is not necessarily the same for all authors, or for each text in an author’s oeuvre. Indeed, because at the retrospective stage of a career works tend to be gathered in selected or collected form according to chronological order, the interval between original publication date and date of the preface tends to diminish as the author’s career progresses. Genette suggests that instances of the longest interval  –​that is, when a preface is used to look back at an early work much later in the career –​are more interesting than cases where there is a smaller gap –​which happens when the late works are considered in isolation, rather than in retrospective conjunction with the earlier. One of the functions of a later preface is that an author can express a preference from among his or her own works. For example, in a new introduction marking the twenty-​fifth anniversary of Waterland in 2008, Graham Swift identified the novel as a key moment in his career since its commercial success

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enabled him to become a full-​time writer.14 In 1991 A.  S. Byatt added a new preface to the reissued edition of The Shadow of the Sun (1964), describing how the novel was written when she was a student at Cambridge between 1954 and 1957, when men outnumbered women by eleven to one and women were ‘fatally torn, when thinking of our futures, by hopes of marriage and hopes of something, some work, beyond getting to university at all’.15 In it, Byatt retrospectively confesses to having modelled the dilemmas of her fictive protagonist on her own experiences and in fact throughout her career she would return to those same experiences in fiction again and again. Writers do this, Genette argues, because ‘writing one’s life consists less of putting the writing at the service of the life than vice versa. Narcissus, after all, is not in love with his visage, but in fact, with his image –​which means, here, with his oeuvre’.16 The Shadow of the Sun is not the work for which Byatt is best known and it would probably not be remembered much had she not gone on to write Possession (1990). But Byatt’s attachment to it can be explained using the ideas of Genette, who suggests it is relatively common that ‘authorial preference … from a conscious or subconscious concern to compensate, easily inclines toward the work less valued by everyone else’.17 Where this is the case, he says, authors cling to the version of themselves manifest in that work by claiming that everything they would subsequently do had been lain down in embryo there. For this reason, Genette suggests, in their early work authors are likely to feature as their own heroes –​but no one else’s. This situation contrasts with what he says about subsequent works, when: the theme most strongly distinguishing the retrospective (in some cases, one could say retroactive) discourse of the delayed preface is doubtless the theme of “I have not changed,” of emotional permanence, and intellectual continuity –​ and this theme appears particularly of course when an author strongly feels the need for it, that is, when he has in fact quite obviously changed.18

This kind of change is overtly the case in what Genette calls ‘post-​conversion discourse’ which in classical texts would typically take the form of a narrative of religious conversion, and in a bildungsroman would involve a change in perception or moral awareness.19 But change over time is in any case what authors do, and the change becomes discernible when the author as ‘postulated’ by one text is triangulated with the author postulated by another two or more others.20 It is arguable that for this reason the early works themselves constitute prefaces for the later. In this sense, Byatt’s 1991 introduction is a ‘later’ preface to the 1964 novel, but the 1964 novel is an ‘original’ preface to all subsequent novels. Thus

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the career construction notion of triangulation supplements existing approaches to author research by making it possible to re-​conceptualize the different stages of an authorial career and the relationship between them. As has already been discussed, the relatively new field of career construction theory shares a common origin in social psychology with the better-​known discipline of psychoanalysis. For complicated reasons, partly related to the successful incursion of psychoanalytic thought into literary study, the tools for analysis offered by career construction have not tended to be brought into the domain of literary research to anything like the same extent. But the shared origin of the two can be glimpsed in Paratexts when Genette uses a metaphor that is common to both: that of the mirror stage. The idea of an earlier text as preface to the reconstruction of an authorial self in a subsequent text is of fundamental significance to the idea of the intimate paratext, and for authors the mirror stage is defined as the moment when consciousness becomes critical self-​consciousness. It occurs in: the prefatorial act mirroring and mimicking itself, in a sympathetic re-​enactment of its own operations. In this sense, the fictional preface –​a fiction of a preface –​ does nothing but aggravate, by exploiting, the preface’s underlying bent towards a self-​consciousness both uncomfortable and playful: playing on its discomfort. I am writing a preface –​I see myself writing a preface –​I describe myself seeing myself writing a preface –​I see myself describing myself …’21

In Genette’s account of the process of literary composition, the metaphor of the mirror functions in the same way as Booth’s implied author, discussed in Chapter 2. Just as the implied audience provides an occasion for the author to think about how others think about him, so too the mirror creates a new degree of critical consciousness on the part of the author as prefaced by previous iterations of the authorial self from which he now departs. Any activity that is prefatorial to the business of announcing one’s presence as writer is a staged activity, the truth of which is brought to fulfilment by passing to the other side of the mirror, from observer to agent. Although Genette appears to intend the metaphor in a conventional Freudian sense, the transition from observer to actor is also precisely the object of career counsellors, who as we have seen employ a narrative method to facilitate their clients in seeing themselves as both participants in their life stories and authors of their own future destinies. Conceptualizing their life stories in narrative enables them to practise a level of self-​depiction that is inseparable from self-​observation. This also happens to be characteristic of literature in general and of fictions of self-​retrospect in particular.

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V. S. Naipaul’s intimate paratext An example of how one work can be considered a preface to another by the same author occurs in the career of V. S. Naipaul. Although Naipaul emerged from the colonized and hence marginalized society of Trinidad in the 1950s, his 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas has subsequently been incorporated into a putative canon of postcolonial works, mainly owing to what Laura Chrisman has referred to as the ‘ironic authority of postcolonial criticism’.22 As a result it is more likely to feature on a syllabus, be borrowed from a library or be picked up by a general reader than many other works of postcolonial writing –​including Naipaul’s own later work. For this reason, Naipaul’s more recent work must consciously bear the weight of the success of an earlier work trapped in an extended present: in 2017 Naipaul remains our contemporary, but 1961 is not contemporaneous with us. A House for Mr Biswas portrayed in epic form many of the recurring themes that dominate the works of the first generation of postcolonial writers. There is a conflict between common ownership and privatization; a dichotomy between public and private space that impinges on the constitution of the self; and a critique of the ‘nuclear’ family. These conflicts are expressed through the symbolism of the house that Biswas dreams of buying. His economic struggles are less important than the aspiration they represent allegorically. Biswas attempts to escape his wife’s wealthy and powerful family by getting a career and a house, but the themes are rendered literal rather than purely symbolic. This means that the novel is not so much about anti-​colonial history in the abstract as Biswas’s attempts to secure the objects of his aspiration in the concrete. This concrete aspiration is conveyed in Naipaul’s portrayal of the Shorthills Estate, where one of Biswas’s early unsuccessful attempts to build a house takes place: The saman trees had lianas so strong and supple that one could swing on them. All day the immortelle trees dropped their red and yellow bird-​shaped flowers through which one could whistle like a bird. Cocoa trees grew in the shade of the immortelles, coffee in the shade of the cocoa, and the hills were covered with tonka bean.23

This description creates a sense of natural plenitude that in turn symbolizes the material aspirations with which Naipaul endows Biswas. Yet it does so in a curiously unsymbolic way. Throughout the novel there is a proliferation of factual detail:  names, ages, occupations, clothing, building material, flora, fauna, food. Again and again this excess of detail militates against too abstract

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an interpretation of Biswas’s struggle and turns the reader back towards the literal. It is possible to make an interpretative leap from Biswas’s life to the major themes of anti-​colonial history, but these are, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, ‘de-​ transcendentalized’, meaning that they are embodied in a series of relationships expressing something smaller and more localized than those world-​historical conflicts.24 Biswas undergoes as concrete experience a process that can be symbolically interpreted as Naipaul’s critique both of private property and the loss of communal solidarity in the decolonizing world, but the symbolic interpretation is not forced. The distinction between protagonist and author would narrow during the course of Naipaul’s subsequent career as he would turn more explicitly to the use of protagonists who are also authors, elevating his work to a metafictive realm that is only present in embryonic form in this early work. This development can be seen in such novels as The Mimic Men (1967), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994) and Half a Life (2001). His most recent novel Magic Seeds (2004) revisits the themes of A House for Mr Biswas in a highly self-​conscious way. Its author-​protagonist Willie is driven by his sister Sarojini to question whether he has achieved anything truly meaningful in his life in either an artistic or a wider political/​historical sense. Even in India he had backed the wrong side in a political uprising and had been imprisoned as a result. Indeed, he had only been released because of his contribution to Indian culture as an author. This action expresses a common dilemma of postcolonial writers by inviting us to ask: which is a more meaningful contribution, opposing a repressive government or writing a commercially successful (but politically quiescent) novel? Having moved to London, Willie stays with the lawyer Roger who he had known thirty years earlier, and works for an architecture magazine while Roger tries to get involved in the booming property market with the tycoon Peter. But whereas the dream of a house was a literal, material ambition for Mr Biswas, Willie and Roger in Magic Seeds describe the English property market in highly metaphorical terms. It is the ‘London property beanstalk’ that has grown up on the ironic ‘magic seeds’ of the title: Roger said, ‘The little Marble Arch house was the seedcorn. I’ve been climbing up that property beanstalk all the time, and it’s got me here. It is true of at least half the people on the street, though we might pretend otherwise.’25

Roger has already started to climb the property beanstalk, moving from the ‘little’ house in Marble Arch to the more impressive one in St John’s Wood where

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he receives Willie. But despite the importance of these locations in the overall narrative of Magic Seeds, the wealth of sensory perception associated with each house in Biswas is no longer here: the real seedlings and nuts have become purely abstract, magic seeds. That is to say, Magic Seeds returns to the same themes as the earlier novel using a comparable symbol of the house, but now in a more metaphorical and less concrete way. This is conveyed through the portrayal of the author-​protagonist Willie, who, like his creator Naipaul, is returning after decades to cast a self-​critical eye on the world he rediscovers and his role in it: London here, as created by the builders and developers of sixty or seventy years before, a kind of toyland, cosy and confined: this is the house where Jack and his wife will live and love and have their litter, this is the shop where Jack’s wife will shop, this is the public house at the corner where Jack and his friends and his wife’s friends will sometimes get drunk.26

Naipaul’s savage representation of suburban life at the start of the twenty-​first century is a world away from the naïve dreams of home ownership he had earlier portrayed in Biswas. There, the idea of the house was an end in itself, whereas here it has become associated with competitive individualism to the detriment of any common good. The allusion to fairy tale renders Naipaul’s critique all the more trenchant, implying the existence of a myriad suburban Jacks trying to scale the property beanstalk, with no wider political or cultural aspiration. Peter’s house does not make him happy: his wife has a lover whose house is bigger and more valuable. The important theme of house prices that symbolized hope for betterment to Mr Biswas has been recoded in a world where property ownership has become equated with an aspect of personal character and hence of economic greed. This brings with it cultural malaise and political quiescence in place of the aspiration for change conveyed in the earlier novel. Where A House for Mr Biswas was able to suggest a moment of optimism, Magic Seeds has no real resolution. The plot does not end so much as stop, as if the capacity to imagine alternatives to the system of competitive economic expansion has disappeared. This perhaps is why Naipaul places the Indian writer Willie in the kind of London he portrays. Having failed to achieve a meaningful contribution to postcolonial political struggles, all Willie can do is try to climb the magic beanstalk. There is little sense that he will be able to overthrow the tycoon Peter who is the giant at the top.27 In other words, the fictive author Willie uses as a symbol of failed hope the same metaphor of the housing market that Naipaul had earlier used to symbolize aspiration. It seems that this late author-​protagonist, looking back over a long career that coincides

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with the long stretch of postcolonial history, is left asking himself what real contribution he has made to that history. As mentioned above, the use of a protagonist who is also an author is not particular to Naipaul’s latest work. On the contrary, many of his protagonists have been writers and Naipaul can be seen as a highly metafictive author, bearing the particular kind of critical self-​consciousness that postcolonial writers often bring to their work as they seek to ‘signify the insertion of the outsider into the discourse’.28 On the other hand, we can say of the relationship of A House for Mr Biswas to Magic Seeds that it takes the form of an intimate paratext. That is, an element of critical conjunction exists in the latter that would have been impossible in the former. Naipaul and his fictive protagonist writer are consciously returning to and revisiting the themes of his earlier work, so that a new element of retrospective authorial representation breaks through. The fictive writer Willie is an autobiographical figure, a fictional author writing themes that Naipaul himself had already written about and therefore also the fictional author of Naipaul’s real work. Over the course of half a century, V. S. Naipaul has been absorbed retrospectively into a literary canon from which he was initially an outsider. This retrospective recognition of his early work has had the effect that his more recent work has remained eclipsed by it. To remain innovative he then had to achieve in fiction a symbolic return to the themes of that earlier work: A House for Mr Biswas prefaces Magic Seeds as a work of fictional self-​retrospect.

The figural consciousness of the narrator When reading a writer like Naipaul who makes repeated use of author protagonists, it can feel tempting to conflate the empirical author with his fictional avatars. But it is important to maintain a distinction between the empirical and the fictive, even when the reader feels the impression of the former in a text purporting to be an instance of the latter. This distinction is maintained by the identification of different levels of narrative organization. In a context somewhat different from that of Gerard Genette, Monika Fludernik uses a complementary method to classify how such levels are constructed, especially through use of free indirect discourse. In The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993) Fludernik sketches out a contextual model of reading based on her theory of how free indirect discourse materializes during the reading process, moving between narrator, narratee, implied author, implied reader and ‘real’ author. It is a model in

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which she transposes the linguistic concept of a script into narrative theory. Such transposition is possible, she argues, because a story can be seen as a kind of linguistic script, laden with context-​specific signifiers and presuppositions. Not the least of these is the presupposition that if there is a story, someone must be telling it, even if this someone is not necessarily the ‘real’ empirical author. That is, the reader builds up the sense of a voice (whether or not there really is one) and in the process builds up also the feeling of a consciousness. The leading argument of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993) is that free indirect discourse is not only a means of reporting speech, it also represents consciousness and subjectivity more generally, in a way that fiction (and only fiction) can. In other words, free indirect discourse is the main means by which fiction fictionalizes. Although she looks at earlier antecedents, Fludernik suggests that its use became common in literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has remained so ever since. She starts off by distinguishing free indirect discourse from both the direct and the indirect on the assumption that direct discourse shares an exact identity with the original speech utterance; and indirect discourse is a simple transplantation of this into reported speech. In other words, her starting position is the assumption that only the free indirect has been thought to depart from the essential unity of the direct. This assumption gives rise to what she calls the ‘dual voice hypothesis’, according to which it is possible to consider the voice of a ‘character’ in direct speech –​that is, in dialogue –​as somehow distinct from that of the author and/​or narrator in reported speech.29 However, Fludernik also suggests that a reader’s interpretation of the subjective language in which a fictional text is written is motivated by mimetic creative reconstruction of the fictional world. This reconstruction depends on a meditational relationship whereby a narrative is conceived of as told unless it clearly indicates otherwise. Thus for a reader, the image of narrator as producer of the narrative (i.e. as author) is always on the horizon, but a clear instantiation of that figure (as narrator and/​or ‘character’) has to be marked linguistically in order to be created as such, because a fictional ‘consciousness’ cannot be projected without the use of language to evoke it. In other words, her main point about a character’s ‘voice’ is that it has to be seen as a ‘textual phenomenon, produced by very deliberate narratorial strategies’.30 This means that there are not two or more distinct voices, merely the impression of different voices. This is why she argues that ‘voice’ as such is not the most appropriate way of conceptualizing free indirect discourse. Instead, she

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recodes the idea of separate voices as the distinction between two cognitive levels on the part of the reader: one is aligned to a narrator persona, and is indexed by knowledge of the story world; the other level relates to the ‘figural consciousness’ of a given character.31 Of course the two intermingle, not only in the special case of indirect speech where one character reports the words and consciousness of another, but also more generally throughout a whole narrative. This intermingling of cognitive levels again militates against the idea of separate voices: ‘The single voice is all the reporter’s language, even if it appears to be the reportee’s, with a dual voice effect on a higher interpretative plane’.32 Exploring how the free indirect evokes a feeling of subjectivity and consciousness is therefore different from suggesting that it represents an already existing, underlying consciousness. As a result, Fludernik overhauls the tripartite classification that distinguishes between direct, indirect and free indirect discourse in fiction, arguing that in a fictional text even direct speech is not identical with the speech act it represents and that the whole of narrative is therefore expressed in the free indirect. In other words, she draws attention to how the free indirect does not so much represent subjectivity by transforming direct speech into the indirect, as create the figural consciousness of the sender or speaker of the narrative. For this reason, her approach is consciously ‘anti-​mimetic’, foregrounding the invented quality of all representational processes.33 It draws on Derrida’s distinction in Of Grammatology between token and type, which argues that although the token (i.e. the representation) is never the same thing as the ideal type it represents, nevertheless it is possible for two things to be schematically congruent because of the shift from the mimetic to the typical. The anti-​mimetic model of speech and thought representation that Fludernik proposes is not a question of how the free indirect represents in narrative exactly what was said (or even, in the case of fiction, what can be imagined to have been said). Her model of representation is different, based instead on typicality and schematization. In other words, it is more a question of what the subject evoked (as opposed to merely represented) by the discourse could typically be considered to say. This, she concludes, is how consciousness is evoked in fiction: ‘The deictic centre and the subjectivity and consciousness with which it correlates are cognitive entities, they can be represented in language only in schematic fashion.’34 Narrative instances of this consciousness are then part of the reader’s overall interpretative strategies, which are determined by the organizational schemata of the text. This interpretation can be described as an impression –​ rather than the literal presence –​of the author in the text.

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Ian McEwan’s meta metafiction So far, this chapter has presented three arguments:  first, drawing on social psychology it has argued that the constructivist practice of triangulation is a tool available for the provisional resolution of career uncertainty by testing the validity of different subject positions against each other in order to arrive at a narrative of self that is both recognizable and meaningful to the individual in question. Second, it has suggested that Genette’s notion of the intimate paratext is a category in which the material conditions of authorship can be related to critical analysis of the fictional product. More specifically, it has conceptualized individual works of fiction as forms of preface to subsequent works, because an author addresses himself as such most directly when he addresses his work and posits a new position from which the perspective of the author appears to emanate. When this happens in a literary career, the relationship between a prefatorial text and an intimate paratext is one of self-​retrospect. In other words, the category of intimate paratexts is a useful one for bringing the general psychological notion of triangulation to bear on our understanding of authorial careers more precisely. Third, because the impression of an author generated by the fictional text is only an impression, and not to be confused with the authentic expression of subjectivity by the genuine empirical author, Fludernik’s distinction between different levels of reader cognition has been used to demonstrate how such an impression is created, rather than merely represented. The first of these arguments was illustrated with regard to A. S. Byatt, whose career triangulates different positions from which the subjectivity of the author emerges in different texts. As we have seen, Byatt makes use of the delayed (1991) preface to The Shadow of the Sun (1964) in order to comment retrospectively on the development of her literary practice. By contrast, the relationship between V. S. Naipaul’s House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Magic Seeds (2004) is an example of the new form of preface that has been defined here drawing on Genette. A House for Mr Biswas prefaces Magic Seeds in the sense that in the latter work Naipaul returns to the stylistic idiom of the former and re-​conceptualizes his own role in it in a way that can properly be called an intimate paratext. Having illustrated the first two arguments in the careers of Byatt and Naipaul, I wish to conclude the chapter by suggesting that all three concepts  –​triangulation, preface and figural consciousness –​can be used to interpret Ian McEwan’s recent novel Sweet Tooth (2012). Initially, Sweet Tooth (2012) shares many of the characteristics of McEwan’s earlier works. Like Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005) it expresses the

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dichotomy between science and the arts in a highly gendered way –​primarily in its portrayal of Serena Frome, a graduate of mathematics who is a much better student of literature than she ever was of science. Like Atonement (2001), Sweet Tooth (2012) is positioned by the text as both the title of a book about the writing of a book, and the title of the book that is written. To the extent that this is true, and to borrow a phrase from Graham Matthews, Sweet Tooth trails in the wake of McEwan’s most typically postmodern works.35 This time, however, there is a difference in cognitive level. Until the final chapter, Sweet Tooth is constructed in a way that presents Serena as its first-​person homo-​diegetic narrator who is employed by military intelligence to identify and support pioneering authors and artists in order to promote the Cold War virtue of freedom of expression. In the course of this work she meets the novelist Tom Haley and begins an affair with him. However, when he learns about the sinister origins of her relationship with him, Haley feels betrayed. His instinct is thus to terminate the affair, until he realizes that by bringing the clandestine world of espionage into his life, Serena has given him rich material to write up as a novel. In the final chapter, therefore, he writes to her informing her that this is what he has done. At this point, the tables are turned: readers discover that his novel is the novel they have been reading and he, not Serena, is its ‘narrator’. In other words, there is the impression of two different narrator voices that Fludernik discusses –​those of Serena and Haley –​in a novel that is really ‘narrated’ by neither for the simple reason that its empirical author is the third narrator, Ian McEwan. At the end of Haley’s letter he informs Serena that he has converted their relationship into a novel and asks her, given that it portrays her as deceitful and dishonest, whether she wants him to publish it: ‘Dearest Serena, it’s up to you.’36 This question introduces not mere ambiguity but also a differentiation between separate categories of fictive worlds. There is no reply from Serena to Haley, so we cannot know how she responds. If we assume that she has refused publication, the status of the whole text would be a realist novel by Ian McEwan, narrated in the first person by Serena Frome and featuring a character, Haley, who is an author, but not the author. On the other hand, if we assume that she has granted permission, the status of the fictive work changes. Not now only a realist novel by McEwan but a metafictive novel by Haley, both of which share the same name. Only a third interpretation makes possible a resolution to this uncertainty:  the possibility that Sweet Tooth is both a realist novel and a work of metafiction so that it operates not just at one level or the other, but at each and a combination of both. In other words, Sweet Tooth organizes its discourse into

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three levels of fictional narrative. Operation Sweet Tooth is functionally enabled when Serena reads several of the stories written by the fictional author Tom Haley. These are assimilated into the wider novel about Serena, in which her reading of his work is interspersed with comments on it purportedly by her. In turn, the narrative about her reading of his work is itself embedded within a larger novel by Haley. In other words, the work by him that she reads is not only fictive, but doubly and triply fictive. It is fiction that exists at a level of fiction even within the fictional world. This triple layering brings Sweet Tooth to a level of fictional cognition beyond what we find in McEwan’s earlier experiment in metafiction in Atonement. There, we might say, he had created a novel-​within-​ a-​novel. Here he goes to another level: a novel-​within-​a-​novel-​within-​a-​novel. If metafiction is defined as fiction about the writing of fiction, then Sweet Tooth could be referred to as a work of meta metafiction:  that is, fiction about the writing of metafiction. Discussing Sweet Tooth in the light of the theoretical concepts developed during this chapter leads to three conclusions. First, McEwan carries out again some of the experiments in metafiction that characterized his best-​known works but arrives at a different outcome, thereby practising a form of triangulation. Second, in the novel McEwan metaphorically speaks to earlier instantiations of himself qua author, in a way that retrospectively causes those earlier texts to herald Sweet Tooth as an intimate paratext. Third, having already developed a reputation for textual experimentation, he takes that practice to a further degree by creating a higher cognitive level on which the fictional world of Sweet Tooth sits. Thus McEwan situates different manifestations of his authorial self in different works over time. Sweet Tooth addresses the themes and techniques already in play in his earlier work, which can therefore be said to preface his dialogue with himself, which is to say, with his work. Finally, that dialogue cannot strictly be said to reside in one text or another, but is instantiated in the relationship between the earlier novels and the subsequent one, which is elevated to a level of meta-​cognition  –​and even meta meta-​ cognition –​as a result.

Notes 1 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 13. 2 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 78. 3 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 52.

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4 Ibid., p. 53. 5 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 36. 6 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 108. 7 Ibid., p. 115. 8 See Mariadele Boccardi, A. S. Byatt: New British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 31. 9 Robert McGill, The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics and Autobiographical Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 89–​90. 10 Regina Rudaityté, Postmodernism and after: Visions and Revisions (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), p. 119. 11 Genette, Paratexts, p. 401. 12 Ibid., p. 331. 13 Roger Grenier, Palace of Books, trans. Alice Kaplan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 105. 14 Graham Swift, ‘Introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition’, Waterland (London: Picador, 2008), p. v. 15 A. S. Byatt, ‘Introduction’, The Shadow of the Sun (London: Vintage, 1991), p. ix. 16 Genette, Paratexts, p. 292. 17 Ibid., p. 255. 18 Ibid., p. 256. 19 Ibid. 20 The idea of the ‘postulated’ author was developed by Alexander Nehamas. Its relationship to Booth’s ‘implied’ author is discussed in Kindt and Müller, The Implied Author, p. 148. 21 Genette, Paratexts, p. 292. 22 Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 127. 23 V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (London: André Deutsch, 1961), p. 414. 24 Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 101–​2. 25 V. S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds (London: Picador, 2004), p. 183. 26 Ibid., p. 223. 27 Ibid., p. 197. 28 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-​Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 55. 29 Fludernik, Fictions, p. 6. 30 Ibid., p. 329. 31 Ibid., p. 331. 32 Ibid., p. 356. Emphasis in original.

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33 Ibid., p. 22. 34 Ibid., p. 432. 35 Graham Matthews, Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism: Contemporary Satire (London: Continuum, 2012). 36 Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 370.

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Chapter 4 combined Gerard Genette’s concept of intimate paratexts with Kobus Maree’s practice of triangulation in career construction. It argued that within the trajectory of an authorial career, a given novel can be seen as a form of preface for one that comes after it by operating as a threshold through which the author (and possibly reader) must pass before arriving at it. In other words, the chapter attempted to conceptualize the relationship between works produced at different stages in a literary career. It did not, however, address the relationship between the individual writer and that vast body of prior works that in effect constitute the whole field of literature. Beginning with Larry Cochran’s definition of different cultural narratives, Chapter 5 will argue that a prominent technique in career construction practice is the use of the collective resources passed on by a culture to inspire individual clients to imagine new life/​career themes of their own. One consequence of the establishment of the scientific method within literary research that was explored in the previous two chapters is that works of theory and criticism have tended to be written in a rigorous impersonal and technical style that emphasizes findings and outcomes over reading experience or textual enjoyment, as if authors or theorists are somehow immune to the pleasures of the text as such. This chapter will argue that authors are no different from other general readers since they too read for enjoyment rather than to generate research outcomes, and that they too are inspired by their encounter with certain prior works of fiction. This is why Booth in The Company We Keep compared reading to a conversation with friends, as a direct contrast to the prevailing inhuman metaphors of systems, networks, webs and so on. In applying Booth’s ideas about enjoyment to how authors read, I will also argue that authors signal those other writers, novels, plays, poems and characters by whom they have been inspired when they incorporate intertextual allusions into their own work.

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The current chapter will explore this use of allusion by drawing on Pierre Bayard’s notions of inner books, inner libraries and collective libraries. Bayard defines the inner book as a notional construct, a term used to refer to the idea of a book before it is written rather than any materially embodied final written ‘book’. The transition from inner to ‘final’ book is enabled through an interplay between what Bayard calls the inner library (that is, an author’s total number of potential but as yet unwritten books, any one of which the finished ‘final’ book may be tending towards and may or may not end up resembling) and the collective library (the sum total of books available to be read). That is, work which has been important to the author either in the collective or the inner library is acknowledged as such and then placed in dialogue with a new book in development. The situation is complicated, however, because it is not only a question of how an author uses his own work to pay tribute to an honoured predecessor. In many cases, the new book simultaneously confronts the presence of the prior material within its own structure and overcomes that presence through a process that Bayard refers to as unreading it. Unreading is a practice in which the field defined by the collective library is made available to the inner library which then cuts itself off from that field in order to create something new and distinctive rather than derivative of it. Unreading in this sense is a highly pertinent notion to discussing fictions of authorial self-​retrospect because it systematically decouples existing work from current practice and enables a new practice to emerge in the full awareness of what has gone before. In other words, unreading is a process by which the existence of prior literary material –​both in the collective field and in the inner library –​is acknowledged in order to be superseded. This theoretical argument will be used to suggest that acknowledging significant literary predecessors through an incorporation of them into a new work is an important technique in Angela Carter’s last novel Wise Children (1992) and Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001). It will also be applied to deeper analysis of A Whistling Woman (2002), the final volume of A. S. Byatt’s ‘Frederica Potter’ Quartet, in which the collective library of literary texts that are important to Byatt are incorporated first into an inner library and then into the structure of a late inner book, in the process of being written up as a late ‘final’ finished work.

Cultural narratives and/​as forms of intertext As we saw in the Introduction, according to Mark Savickas one of the reasons why people enter career counselling is because they have recently experienced a

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period of career uncertainty, or ‘disequilibrium’.1 In practice, however, this is not always the case. Larry Cochran argues that, as a goal of the counselling process, moving from a set of circumstances that are ‘good’ to ones that are simply ‘better’ is as valid as moving from failure to remedy.2 Such a decision does not rely on something having gone wrong and is not merely reactive. Kobus Maree therefore replaces the idea of disequilibrium with the less anguished metaphor of a career ‘crossroads’.3 A crossroads implies two or more different destinations signposted in different directions so that the available choice is a matter of selecting between predetermined options and following the prescribed route. The trouble with this is that a client in counselling may not know either where he is going or how to get there and has to construct this knowledge for himself without external signposting. Cochran therefore uses a different metaphor again, that of a ‘decision situation’.4 In fact, he is very interested in the decision-​ making process and argues that to evaluate different career options is necessarily to choose between them, otherwise there would be no decision to make. In order to conceptualize that process, he distinguishes between first-​order forms of evaluation and second-​order evaluative mechanisms. The forms of decision-​ making associated with first-​order evaluation are related to those described in Chapter  1 as the ‘trait-​factor approach’. They use mainly quantitative, factual data to assess how effectively different roles or environments might bring to fulfilment the affective requirements of the client. Although not inappropriate in the counselling relationship, it is incomplete because it fails to allow for the possibility of modification and evolution in both the desires and the environments. As such it leaves little room for flexibility and cannot conceptualize deep-​rooted change across life chapters. Second-​order evaluation, by contrast, is a deeper, richer and more complex form of reflection. It is less about how effectively a client’s desires are met by a given role than it is about the qualitative worth of the desires one has. When life stories are assimilated into narrative, life histories must be connected to possible futures in order to clarify meaningful options and enable the client to evaluate and hence decide between them. This in turn enables the client to identify different and often conflicting desires within him or herself, evaluate them comparatively and determine which should be acted upon. This means that determining which desires one attaches highest priority to is more important than gauging the effectiveness of particular roles in meeting desires: ‘The question of efficacy is subordinate to the question of priority.’5 In practice, as we have seen, the starting point for counselling is not necessarily a problem or failure, and the individual may not even be aware of different

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potential future narratives. This is why Cochran’s decision situation is more flexible than Maree’s crossroads or Savickas’s disequilibrium. The decision situation refers to a situation of potential change where clients must identify for themselves different potential career destinations –​and how to reach them –​through narrative, and in which the difference between actual and ideal might merely be congruent with the difference between good and better. The point about second-​order evaluation in a decision situation is that it moves beyond superficial features to enable a complex consideration of how to define what is good and what would be better in a more meaningful and sophisticated way. Making such judgements is highly dependent on the contingent and variable values of the person concerned. Thus Cochran suggests that in choosing between two options, one ‘might name a few pros and cons for each, but the question of priority is not resolvable at this level. To determine priority, one must shift to a deeper level. Better or worse for what, or to what end?’6 In effect, this rhetorical question leads Cochran onto the wider question of how we make value judgements, that is, the question of criteria. The client’s constructions of ideal and possible futures are not static and are themselves constantly revised over time through a dialectical relationship with each other. The movement from actual to ideal (or at least, closer to ideal) is the aim of career counselling, which bridges the gap between them by generating a convincing, liveable narrative that blends the ideal with the actual. Creating an affective narrative of self engenders a dichotomy between the individual as spectator to their own lives and that same individual as actor or participant in the story: ‘[A]‌spectator is impotent without a participant, and a participant is vacuous without a spectator. The two modes of being work together to make up a person.’7 The narrative method in counselling integrates each of these elements by generating a narrative of which the individual is the author and in which he is also the primary agent. Moreover, the narrative that is generated also integrates different temporal perspectives on a person’s selfhood by unifying past and present selves with a potential future self, even across periods of apparent change: ‘A story that integrates past, present, and future is better than one that emphasizes one time period to the relative neglect of others.’8 The purpose of applying career construction approaches to fictions of self-​ retrospect is specifically to challenge the conventional ‘decline’ narratives associated with ‘late’ career fictions. As argued in the Introduction, critical discussion of such work is typically comparative in approach, and uses evaluative language that implies the ‘later’ work is not as good as the earlier. Unspoken in such a comparison is the assumption that it is easy to compare works from different

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career stages by the same criteria. Career counselling, by contrast, tells us that the author necessarily does something different in each career stage so that the criteria by which the works are judged have also to be remade. In other words, just as the concept of ‘lateness’ has been critically under-​interrogated, so too the basis on which critical judgements of late works are made has received relatively little attention. The tools and methodology of career construction provide an opportunity to address these shortfalls. Since his main focus is on how career decisions are made, Cochran identifies three ways of crystallizing decisions: an exploratory decision, a choice and a decision proper. What he calls an ‘exploratory decision’ is a decision to investigate a particular career course, without necessarily committing to it.9 A choice is then defined as the act of making a selection from a range of options, where the options are conceptualized as a number of different rival narratives or scripts that are evaluated against each other until one becomes superordinate and the others are subsumed into it.10 Perhaps surprisingly, what he refers to as a decision proper is as much an involuntary process as a conscious, voluntary one: ‘Decisions seem to come over a person rather than to be made in a voluntary fashion like a choice. And when one is moved by experience, swept along by a vision, one must voluntarily consent to it.’11 Arising out of his theoretical insight into the complex mechanisms by which we make decisions, Cochran’s major contribution to career construction theory is a preliminary consideration of how different cultural backgrounds situate and impinge upon an individual’s narrative of self. This consideration has arisen only very briefly elsewhere in the field. For instance, Savickas advises counsellors to be aware that ‘autobiographical memory varies according to the cultural forms of social interaction that shape it’,12 and distinguishes between Western ‘individual’ forms of relationship and ‘Eastern’ communal ones.13 Though raising the question of how cultural background complicates the relationship between counsellor and client and hence the kind of narrative that is elicited during counselling, his approach unfortunately seems to essentialize a notion of ‘the East’, rendering it static and unchanging. Similarly, it fails to interrogate the dogmatic assumption that Western cultures are inherently individualistic and hence also renders as intrinsic what are really only contingent and potentially changeable differences between the ‘West’ and the rest of the world. This happens even though Savickas warns that counsellors must stay ‘sensitive to issues of multiculturalism and individual differences’.14 A contrasting approach is provided by Jean Guichard, Jacques Pouyard and Bernadette Dumora who have pointed out a potential critique of the career

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construction model, which is that although it may assist individuals to participate in professional life, it leaves little room either for questioning the dominant ideology of the society or for expressing solidarity with others, especially ‘vulnerable workers’.15 Maree sets out the somewhat ambitious expectation that career construction can be a counselling practice of benefit to all people ‘irrespective of colour, creed, financial situation or geographic location’.16 This hope seems rather naïve and unnuanced, erasing cultural differences between the diverse locations he mentions, from Sydney to Sao Paulo and from New York to Nigeria. He also, however, goes on to say that while the dominant individualistic paradigm may be suitable to Western economies, more research is needed to show if it is suitable to cultures in the developing world.17 In effect, Cochran makes an initial contribution to that research when he discusses the relationship between narrative as a method for career counselling and the broader cultural narratives in which the client is implicated. Cultural narratives are different from individual life stories in that they are collectively and cumulatively generated. Cultural narratives reflect the culture and society in which the individual is rooted. They are communal, commonly owned and deeply felt. This explains why in Cochran’s account, it is not so much the case that individuals take decisions as it is a case of people being taken by their decisions. One can no more decide on whether or not to belong to one or more cultures than one can decide on whether or not to be born. Decisions relating to a given culture are socially structured rather than subjective, but there is the possibility of making a new contribution to a given culture, and by contributing to it, changing it. This possibility is of particular importance in multicultural societies. An example Cochran gives of the intersection between cultural narratives and individual narratives is the case of Korean immigrants to America’s West Coast. Their cultural narrative had emphasized willingness to work hard over long periods of time, and a flair for numeracy and critical business acumen were core attributes of that culture –​even though in each individual’s self-​narrative these things may have been undesirable or even painful. In this way, the cultural narrative supported the individual narrative of self indirectly and in a complex manner. Cochran concludes that the adoption of an agent narrative is made possible when a counsellor and client co-​construct different scripts as possible alternatives for a future decision, incorporating all the competing stories within one overarching narrative and hence co-​authoring a new chapter in the client’s life history. This capacity of the meta-​narrative to incorporate conflicting and competing potential micro-​narratives is a powerful method in counselling because

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although the client has to make a choice between options, all the options remain operative even after the decision is made. This is why a decision is not properly addressed to a specific task; it is about more general orientations and values as these become manifest over time. Cochran’s point about cultural narratives is that they can serve as potential life or career trajectory models for the clients of career counselling because they situate individuals within a broader culture or community, making available to the individual all of that culture’s collective narrative resources. The individual then takes up those resources and in using them, partially modifies them. I will argue below that the relationship between an author and her wider culture can be considered congruent with that between a career counsellor’s client and the cultural narratives shaping and feeding into that client’s individual narrative. As a form of collective cultural memory, cultural narratives are of evident and unusually salient importance to authors. Not so much at the level of ‘influence’ or ‘source study’ (although these are legitimate fields of inquiry in their own right), but more at the level of intertextual narrative resources and existing historical antecedents, cultural narratives inform and underpin the new narrative that is generated each time the practice of authorship occurs.

The collective library Cultural narratives inform the decision-​making process in complex and indirect ways because they provide an alternative set of reference points to those laid down in an individual’s life story. In the more specific case of literary careers, the concept of cultural narratives can usefully be redefined as that of the collective library, a concept that was developed by the French literary theorist Pierre Bayard. Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read (2008) is rare in the academic pantheon for its capacity to combine serious insight with humour. Its purpose was to draw attention to the fact that there are, as it were, more than one way of ‘not reading’ a book. He noted that critical analysis of fiction has tended to depend on the reasonable assumption that the analyst has read the work in question. This assumption creates an implicit dichotomy between works one has read and works one has not read, a dichotomy that in Bayard’s account is at odds with how readers actually experience the field of literature as a whole because it fails to account for the possibility of a given reader having a certain degree of familiarity with a given text (via the mediation of other sources) without having

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read it. He thus introduces a series of nuances or gradations in our understanding of the different ways of ‘not reading’ a book, ranging on a spectrum from ‘books you don’t know’ and ‘books you have skimmed’ to ‘books you have heard of ’ and finally, ‘books you have forgotten’. In his discussion of books you don’t know, Bayard embraces the ironic position of a book lover who doesn’t read. This position enables him to present the suggestion that the not-​reading of any particular book is a way of venerating the whole and potentially infinite world of all books. In effect, he argues that not-​reading a specific book is a means of avoiding getting bogged down in particulars and so gives rise to a greater proportional respect for the whole field of books and the relationship between all of its constituent members. He refers to this field as the ‘collective library’ and uses the term to refer to the sum total of all books that are available to a given reader.18 In other words he uses the word ‘books’ rather than the word ‘literature’ as a means of avoiding over-​privileging a preconceived notion of what constitutes the ‘literary’, and uses the term ‘collective library’ to direct attention to the many different forms of narrative and kinds of knowledge that books make available to readers. Paying too great a level of attention to the specificities of any single text militates against this apprehension of the field and in that sense he calls it, paradoxically, ‘anti-​reading’.19 That is, in his account, any specific example disproportionately impinges upon the collective library as a whole. The not-​reading of ‘books you have heard of ’ is a slightly different process from the not-​reading of ‘books you don’t know’. In this case, Bayard demonstrates a practice of not-​reading by reconstructing the plot elements of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose in a way that is riddled with factual errors and inconsistencies of the kind lazy students are likely to fall into if they rely on unverified commentaries rather than working through the complex source. In his reconstruction, Bayard has two characters discuss a third book, the contents of which are important to the mystery plot. At the same time, however, he notes that the two characters each have different reasons for trying to trace the lost book and, as a result, value the book itself in different ways. For Bayard, the encounter between two different readers who ostensibly talk about the same book but who at a deeper underlying level actually end up talking about entirely different things is emblematic of what happens every time two different readers discuss the same book. Following Freud, he refers to the unconsolidated textual object that each character believes himself to be talking about when he talks about the lost book as a screen book. The screen book is a hypothetical object that creates an opportunity for discussion of the real book

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which shares its name but which is an undefined, continually receding object. The more we discuss the screen book, the less distinct the real book will feel and the more it recedes from view: ‘As soon as we begin to read, and perhaps even before that, we begin talking to ourselves and then to others about books. We will resort thereafter to these comments and opinions, while actual books, now rendered hypothetical, recede forever into the distance.’20 The capacity of a book gradually to become evanescent during the course of any discussion about it causes Bayard to introduce another term, the inner library. This is that stock of highly personal reading references that the individual makes, which is part of the collective library discussed above and which shape the individual’s relationship to the field. In effect, Bayard says, the screen book replaces the real material book in discussions of it because when we attempt to communicate between the collective library and the inner library, the two come into tension with each other. What we say in the discussion is the product of our own inner libraries, which means among other things that we have much at stake in such an effort and do not necessarily want to relinquish the inner library because to do so is also to relinquish a sense of our own subjectivity. Although his retelling of The Name of the Rose contains deliberate errors at the factual level, Bayard argues that his summary feels true to the spirit and conception of Eco’s novel as he remembers it and therefore cannot be described as entirely false. This means that the pitfalls and distortions of memory are an important factor in his discussion of books you haven’t read. Memory is not a limiting or undermining factor in his view, but gives rise to a new form of fictional reconstruction and hence creativity on the part of the reader, especially once a certain amount of time has elapsed since the act of reading took place. The last category of not-​reading that Bayard discusses is therefore books you have forgotten. In discussing this last form of not-​reading, Bayard uses the example of Montaigne’s practice of writing a few comments at the end of everything he had read. This was partly a way of indicating that he had read it in case he forgot; and also a means of reminding himself what he had thought about it. In other words, one component of the experience of reading is that it takes place in and over time. Because of this, to start reading is instantly to start forgetting and reading itself is a process of effacement as much as of enrichment. Montaigne may have written his comments about something he read at one stage in his life and then returned to them years later. Without reading the text again to check whether or not he still thinks the same thing about the book that he expressed in the earlier comments it would be hard to say that the comments accurately express

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his own current interpretation of the text. On the other hand, those comments are not wholly external or alien to him, either. They both are and are not his own opinions. Or as Bayard puts it: ‘Montaigne has become other to himself. He is separated from the earlier incarnation of himself by the defects of his memory and his readings of his notes represent so many attempts at unification.’21 The problem of a writer’s non-identity with prior incarnations of his authorial self over time is one of the main considerations in defining fictions of self-​ retrospect. Bayard’s discussion of Montaigne takes this problem to a more acute degree when he says that notes and comments written by the later Montaigne revealed a number of instances in which Montaigne not only failed to remember having read certain things he had read, but also failed to remember certain things that he had written himself, even to the extent of not recognizing his own work when confronted with it. In his summary of different late-​career works of art explored in Chapter 3, Julian Barnes says the same thing about the retrospective relationship of Ravel to his own music.22 According to Bayard, the capacity to forget one’s own work naturally gives rise to a fear of ‘repeating yourself without realizing it, and knowing the anguish of losing mastery over your own writing only to remain unwittingly all too faithful to yourself ’.23 The irony of the artist being too faithful to himself is that in these cases of forgetting he may then go on writing much the same in endless repetition. Thus Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence, which will be explored further in Chapter 6, can be extended by Bayard (via Montaigne) into an anxiety over the relationship between earlier and later aspects of the authorial self: ‘While reading is enriching in the moment it occurs, it is at the same time a source of depersonalization, since, in our inability to stabilize the smallest snippet of text, it leaves us incapable of coinciding with ourselves.’24 To Bayard, the Montaigne example shows that the memory of the reader is not unified but fragmentary, lost and uncertain and therefore contributes to the formation of a consciousness and subjectivity that is always also in the process of being remade. This process effaces the distinction between reading and non-​ reading –​for who can meaningfully be said to have read something they don’t remember? Since Bayard’s reader turns out in most cases to be another writer, it also leaves the reader unable to distinguish his works from those of others. He is thus likely to feel threatened by each encounter with a book for it brings him face to face with his own non self-​identity over time. These differences in reading experience and cultural perspective constitute the inner library, which is Bayard’s term for the unspoken but collectively understood narratives that hold a culture together; that exist to some degree of

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commonality across that culture; and that an individual member of that culture is able to recognize as such. For example, imagining a Western anthropologist attempting to discuss Hamlet with the Tiv people of Western Africa, Bayard suggests that members of the Tiv are caught in a ‘double exteriority’ with regard to the play: (a) because they haven’t read it, and (b) coming from a different culture they cannot conceive of the social structure it portrays.25 According to Clarke Rountree, Bayard shows that ‘meaning is thus based on one’s experience with literature […] and cultural perspective’ so that ‘no two people can ever approach a piece of literature from the same point of view’.26 Arising out of this sense of individual distinctiveness, the final term Bayard proposes for conceptualizing how an individual work becomes part of the collective library is inner book. The inner library is not only a local form of the collective library, but also one that functions in the manner of Cochran’s cultural narrative. In Bayard’s example, cultural narratives hold the Tiv tribe together and the cohesion that eventuates causes members of the ‘tribe’ to reject Hamlet as it does not accord with their worldview. The inner library then modulates between individual and group through the imagination of an inner book. This is because the inner book is another kind of screen book. It refers less to a physical material object than to a hypothetical text readers think they are talking about when they talk about reading. When they discuss Hamlet with a Western anthropologist, the Tiv are in effect talking about their own inner book rather than the play itself. The discussion then becomes a dialogue between two different inner books, hers and theirs, where Hamlet creates the pretext for each and where the real book gradually becomes enfolded within the inner book. The notion of the inner book is a pivotal one in Bayard’s vocabulary because it forms a point of intersection between his ways of thinking about reading and ways of conceptualizing the writer. This is because although not all readers become writers, the same is not true the other way around. All writers, Bayard says, are readers, and their reading practice is an important component of their writing. The whole point of distinguishing between different ways of not-​reading is to suggest that in effect, every time readers talk about a book they have not read, they are manifesting the same behaviours as a writer: creating and constructing something new. In such discussion, the book that has been ‘not-​read’ is superseded by the ‘screen’ book, which becomes a pretext for discussion of a new creative moment: We might further speculate that every writer is driven by the attempt to discover and give form to his inner book and is perpetually dissatisfied with the actual

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books he encounters, including his own, however polished they may be. How indeed might we begin to write, or continue doing so, without that ideal image of a perfect book –​one congruent to ourselves, that is –​which we endlessly seek, and constantly approach, but never reach?27

Of course, only readers who are also practising writers go on to write up the new material that is created as a result of the encounter between the collective and individual inner libraries. Nevertheless, in Bayard’s way of thinking about the concept of not-​reading, reading itself is at least potentially a prelude to writing for every reader because it furnishes opportunities for creativity. The less strictly that creativity is restrained by what has been read, the more innovative it is free to be. Moreover, in the realm of literary discussion what is discussed is never merely the material book, but also, in a real sense, the subjectivity of the reader (who is a writer as well). Allowing the factual details of a book to constrain what is said about it is thus to lose access to an element of self-​expression. In certain cases, this means that the inner books available in the collective library or the inner library have not only to be ‘not-​read’, but also actively ‘unread’.28 That is, an attempt has to be made to slough off or avoid the constraining presence of the inner library in the attempt to create a new individual inner book. ‘Unreading’ is thus an autobiographical practice, a quest in which transitory literary works serve as supports rather than as the central focus. This sense of the transitory leads Bayard to the conclusion that to write well is to read well, where to read well is defined as turning away from the work being read, which otherwise obscures the autobiographical and creative goal of writing: Beyond the possibility of self-​discovery, the discussion of unread books places us at the heart of the creative process, by leading us back to its source. To talk about unread books is to be present at the birth of the creative subject. In this inaugural moment when book and self separate, the reader, free at last from the weight of the words of others, may find the strength to invent his own text, and in that moment, he becomes a writer himself.29

What Bayard says about reading is also true of what he says about the writing process more generally. Indeed, his stress on what critical reading and creative writing have in common accounts for the lively, unconventional and satirical tone of his theoretical work. To be creative, he argues, it is necessary both to have accumulated a range of reading experience to draw on in the inner library, and to unread that prior material by replacing the inner library with a ‘virtual’ library, a much freer, looser and therefore less constraining realm. To enter into

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a book is to risk losing one’s sense of self and hence for the writer it is also to stake his own creativity. Writers as writers cannot take this risk on behalf of their authorial selves so that misrecognizing or misconstruing a text is a mechanism by which they avoid allowing themselves to be damaged or constrained by what they have read. Unreading the collective library in order to become the creator of new works is thus the logical endpoint of talking about books we haven’t read.

Cultural narrative in Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie So far this book has argued that career construction theory brings a new dimension to the field of authorship research. This is not only for the banal reason that subjects in career counselling tell stories. Indeed, if this were the only reason for bringing one body of work into the domain of the other, the resulting ideas would not detain us for long  –​primarily because the narratives created by people in counselling in practice, though important to those individuals, are unlikely to attract much critical attention as art. It is because career construction employs a narrative method that it can be considered a theory of authorship at a much more general level. The metaphor of authorship on which it depends becomes meaningfully active, and even starts to be literally instantiated, when the individuals whose careers come under consideration are already authors to begin with. When career construction theory is brought into the domain of authorship research, the concept of cultural narrative can be defined as the sum total of those prior literary works that have configured in advance the field into which the author enters when she writes a new work. That is, the cultural narratives within which literary careers are situated can be understood as their collective libraries. To write a picaresque novel, a condition of England novel, a working-​ class novel is necessarily also to draw on and to allow oneself to become aligned with the existing works that define those traditions and provide its own resources for renewal. On the other hand, the presence of a tradition in a new work might also be ironically apparent in the contrasting case  –​where the author rebels against and tries to transform or break apart the possibilities that are laid down in advance by the collective library. In effect, these are the two possibilities that Cochran identifies for using the cultural narrative to propel the author into action: model to be emulated or constraining limit to transform. A major factor that complicates our understanding of whether or not cultural narratives are consciously accepted (or avoided) by an individual author is the theoretical perspective propounded by Cochran on the notion of a decision. In

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the last instance, as we have seen, decisions expressed in response to cultural narratives are not matters of specific intention, are rarely made with full consciousness of their implications and are not defined in a spatio-​temporal sense. As we have seen, decisions take us rather than we them and furthermore, they take us over a gradual and extended period of time rather than in a single instant. This study is not concerned with discovering authorial intentions in an empirical sense. However, the previous chapter revealed that the notion of intentionality is the starting point for career construction practice. When the constructivist paradigm is applied to discussion of authorial careers, this means that it is necessary to acknowledge that authors have some intention each time they begin a new work. Trying to find out exactly what that intention is, through some kind of psychic literary archaeology, need not concern us. The recognition that there is an intention to do something is enough. Angela Carter’s final novel Wise Children (1991), for example, incorporates into its own texture a range of intertextual allusions to the work of Shakespeare, Coleridge and Dylan Thomas. Their works are clearly a part of Carter’s inner library so that by using them in her own work she is able both to pay tribute to a number of valued precursors in the art of fiction, and bring about small modifications in the traditions on which she draws. Wise Children opens with Nora and Dora Chance slapping on make-​up to go out to a one hundredth birthday party so that ‘nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night’.30 That is, it starts with an allusion to Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (1951), which is a poem the novel shares many themes with: questioning how far being ‘wise’ is a logical consequence of age, the relationship between fathers and children, the apprehension of ageing and a refusal to grow old gracefully. In other words, if we move from the novel to the poem that it points us to, we find more material than is in the novel, reinforcing our understanding of it thematically. A similar thing happens during the Hollywood section of Wise Children, where Nora has a brief affair with the Italian-​American Tony. When their engagement is broken off, the promised marriage never takes place and the sisters go ‘home with grandma, sadder and wiser girls’.31 These words are an allusion to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), which is bracketed by a frame narrative that describes the circumstances in which the mariner retrospectively tells his tale at a wedding party, where the guests are profoundly unsettled by what they hear. In other words, the novel signposts us in the direction of a prior text of indirect but nevertheless adjacent thematic relevance. It is not so much a case of the later text simply quoting the earlier as it is of the later text allowing

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the language and fabric of the earlier poem to insinuate itself within its own discursive spaces. A third example in Wise Children of how the inner library provides a cultural narrative out of which a new individual inner book can be created is what happens when the aged twins finally arrive at Perry’s birthday celebration: ‘[H]‌e saw the girls we always would be under the scrawny, wizened carapace that time had forced on us for, although promiscuous, he was also faithful, and where he loved, he never altered, nor saw any alteration.’32 That is, the recognition chapter elaborates on the central themes of the novel by echoing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds /​Admit impediments.’ The sonnet is a complex metaphysical consideration of relationships between men and women, parents and children, ageing and loss, which are also in a less spiritual context the themes of the novel. Moving from the novel to that intertext adds something to our understanding of the novel, something that is not necessarily in the novel, but can be considered of it. It is a novel about the lives and loves of a dynasty of actors –​and it is created in the words of the Shakespearean characters those actors have performed. In each of these cases Carter’s use of intertext is incomplete, not so much directly quoting as briefly and loosely alluding to work in the prior cultural narrative, which is defined by the English literary history within which she situates herself.33 The allusions, though voiced in dialogue by one or more speaking characters, do not feel like the expressions of those characters, and feel more as if they have entered the text at the level of general discourse. They are thus a good example of Fludernik’s refutation of the ‘dual voice hypothesis’ discussed in the previous chapter. What is unusual about Wise Children is that prose narrative often evokes the impression of different voices, mainly through the inclusion of fictional dialogue. Despite its dialogue, Wise Children evinces the opposite feeling, of a single, generalized voice. This feeling is enhanced by emphasizing that neither the girls who ostensibly speak the words nor the empirical author Carter herself need necessarily know where the words come from in order to be able to quote them in this indirect way –​especially since, as we have seen, the main purpose of investigating cultural narratives is not normally either conscious intention or biographical verification. Following Cochran’s insight into the complex mechanics of a decision situation and how this is complicated by a cultural narrative, we can say that Carter did not so much choose her intertexts as allow herself to be chosen by them. This is because they partially constitute the field in which she worked. The question of empirically verifiable authorial intention does not arise because consciousness

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of decision is transcended both by the dynamics of the decision itself and by the expression of existing cultural narratives in the process of being written up by the individual author into a final inner finished work. In the case of Wise Children, the specific intertexts are multiple and come from different moments in literary history. They can however be reconciled to each other at the level of cultural narrative since they are all –​to some extent –​a part of the same cultural and literary tradition, that is, English literature. Cultural narratives, however, need not be singular. On the contrary, in the context of globalized multicultural societies, the cultural narratives in and through which an individual is able to situate herself are becoming increasingly multiple, with the effect that the narratives themselves overlap, intersect and at times contradict each other. In career construction practice, the complexity that arises when different cultural narratives interact with each other is more subtly appreciated by Cochran than by Savickas or Maree. Cochran is interested in the full range of internal and external factors that might influence an individual career decision. This range includes a consideration of the expectations created by different kinds of relationships in a multicultural society and the necessity for an individual to navigate the plots and storylines of very different cultural narratives simultaneously. Particular cultures offer their own collective narratives that have provided meaningful structure to their members over time, but as cultures have become more culturally entwined with each other the narratives have become correspondingly more complex. Arising out of the myriad levels and perspectives that different cultural narratives provide, the narratives themselves might even conflict with each other. Cochran says that ‘the guidance of cultural narratives has become more doubtful’ because the narratives generated by one culture don’t always affirm the same values as another:  a female immigrant from Hong Kong to the United States of America is likely to be torn between a Western narrative of self-​fulfilment and an Eastern one of family obligation.34 To put it another way, the idea that cultural communities provide singular common narratives through which to anchor their members has come increasingly in doubt during the age of globalization and ‘violations of this common sense appear to be growing’.35 This means that it is increasingly difficult to assume a commonality of cultural value and worldview, even within one society. Cochran refers to this increasing complication of cultural narratives through their mutual interaction, and the resulting difficulty in using any one cultural narrative as a source of vocational career guidance as the ‘storied ecology of career development’.36

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A case of this storied multicultural ecology within a literary career, and one that contrasts somewhat with the singular tradition of English literature on which Angela Carter draws, is the work of Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), is a work of magical realism in which magical or fantastical elements are presented as components of an otherwise realist narrative. It is rich in allusions to a variety of different traditions in literature, history, language and religion. Hindu mythology and Bollywood cinema sit alongside Western cultural myths of both a populist and a more traditionally ‘literary’ nature. Saleem and his son Aadam may have the physical attributes (ears and nose) of the elephant god Ganesh of Hindu epic, but the power of telepathy generated by his nose also recalls Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), which is often taken to be the ‘first’ English novel. That is to say, whereas Carter’s cultural narrative is singularly English (despite her variety of intertextual reference), Rushdie’s are multiple and diverse. This is again less a matter of conscious choice than of the different cultural narratives in which Rushdie was involved. The portrayal of the interrelationship of different cultural narratives would dominate his subsequent work: The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). By the time of his next novel Fury (2001), Rushdie had drawn on the theme so often that it seemed in danger of using itself up. He therefore made a significant departure that is tantamount to a new career stage. The dilemma facing Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children is of knowing which country, culture and history he belongs to, in the face of a postcolonial suspicion of the viability of sustaining such categories as country, culture and history in the first place. Malik Solanka’s dilemma in Fury is of a different order. Having developed a profitable career as a maker of dolls that have proved commercially so successful that he is unable to stop producing them, Solanka’s problem is not so much a question of knowing where to belong but of wondering how to escape. In this sense Fury expresses a desire on the part of the artist to transcend the life that he had built for himself through his own artistic creation. The transition from a problematic of belonging in the earlier novel to a theme of entrapment and a longing for escape in the later is comparable to the transition within the career of Graham Swift, discussed in Chapter 2, from early fictional portrayals of vocation as a positive aspiration on the part of one or more characters to later representations of vocation as the expression of a negative limit. Just as Swift’s varying representation of different forms of vocation was tantamount to an ongoing engagement with his own vocation as a writer, so too Rushdie uses the portrayal of an artist in Fury to try and answer a number of questions that had become highly germane to his own artistic career: how far

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is it possible for a successful artist to break away from the work that has already established his reputation? What would such an artist have to do in order to escape such entrapment in the hands of his own creation? What is the creative, emotional and intellectual cost of doing so? In Midnight’s Children Rushdie positions the main antagonists Saleem and Shiva in close physical and emotional proximity to each other, then moves them apart in order to inaugurate their quest to track each other down. The same structure underpins the narratives of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses. In Fury too the sequence in which Solanka abandons his lovers Eleanor, Mila and Neela in pursuit of a new artistic vision pre-​empts the climactic moment at which all four of them confront each other once more. When this happens, Rushdie points up a symbolic identification of these women with the three Furies of ancient Greek myth: In Athens the Furies were thought to be Aphrodite’s sisters. Beauty and vengeful wrath, as Homer knew, sprang from the selfsame source. That was one story. Hesiod, however, said that the Furies were born of Earth and Air, and that their siblings included Terror, Strife, Lies, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Fear and Battle […] These days the goddesses, less-​regarded, were hungrier, wilder, casting their nets more widely. As the bonds of family weakened, so the Furies began to intervene in all of human life. From New York to Lilliput-​Blefuscu there was no escape from the beating of their wings.37

Having drawn his readers’ attention to the congruence between Eleanor, Mila and Neela and the Furies, Rushdie goes to great lengths to ensure we understand the cultural resonance of that symbolism. One of the differences between Fury and Rushdie’s earlier novels is that the India and Britain portrayed in them are tangible, real places whereas the Lilliput-​Blefuscu to which Solanka follows Neela and where he gets caught up in sectarian conflict is allegorical; it is not a real place. The allusion made in Fury to the Lilliput of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels on the one hand, and its metaphoric transplantation into a Southern Pacific island community characterized by inter-​racial violence on the other, both show that there is the same entwinement of different cultural narratives in Fury as there was in Rushdie’s earlier work. Stylistically speaking, however, the turn to abstraction shows that Fury belongs to a different and later stage in Rushdie’s ongoing re-​conceptualization of globalized multicultural narratives. There is a second stylistic difference, which is that the explanatory tone that dominates Fury is very unlike the tone Rushdie had used in Midnight’s

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Children or The Satanic Verses. There, readers either identify the different Hindu, Muslim and Western cultural narratives invoked or they do not; they are not subjected to excessive exposition. A reader versed in one of the cultures in question is likely to misrecognize the layers of additional meaning generated by allusion to the others, and vice versa, but the textual scaffolding is minimal and the signposting to each set of traditions is opaque. In Fury by contrast, by constantly assailing the reader with detailed guides on how they should read, Rushdie leaves little possibility that the cultural reference points will go unnoticed. From the ancient Greeks to Gulliver; from Krzysztof Kieślowski to Deepak Chopra; and from the Moguls to Marshall McLuhan, histories, cultures, films and literatures are unremittingly and explicitly textualized. Even more than Angela Carter’s intertextual eruptions, these moments of exegesis and explanation are thoroughly dissociated from any individual ‘character’ in the fiction and feel like aspects that have come to inhere within the text itself. Many of the works that Rushdie alludes to are themselves of a meta-​textual nature, commenting on the process of artistic creation while also embodying the finished product of that process. In other words, the fabric of the novel Fury creates a reprise of a number of texts that are already meta-​textual. This brings the novel to a dimension beyond the meta-​textual nature that characterized Rushdie’s earlier work, and activates the second-​order meta-​textuality, or meta metafiction, that was defined in the previous chapter. In the hands of Ian McEwan, those adventures in Meta Meta Land were an instance of the creation of a level of fictional cognition beyond that of postmodernism. In Rushdie’s case the artist is in danger of being superseded by the strength of his own earlier creation. Unable to slough off the strength of those cultural narratives, Fury instead hyper-​sanctifies them and in doing so effaces itself almost entirely. When this happens, the narrative of Fury as such disappears behind Fury as vehicle for the expression of those prior narratives with the effect that the reader is unable to read beyond them or unread them. Thus Fury as text performs its own unreading.

A.  S. Byatt’s return of the repressed In Carter’s Wise Children and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the different cultural narratives in which the authors are involved are made manifest in subtle and indirect ways. The cultural narratives themselves are detached from the

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contexts in which they had arisen and then transplanted into surprisingly different terrains and territories. This de-​contextualization has the effect that each text is situated within one or more different cultural traditions without becoming enslaved by them. Carter clearly signals the different traditions in romantic poetry that provide the field into which her own novel enters, but the idiom, tone and theme of Wise Children evince a set of characteristics that are discernibly different from those traditions and are particular to itself. Midnight’s Children cuts across different cultural narratives and positions its readers differentially with regard to their capacity or otherwise to navigate the diverse cultures in question. The narrative fiction itself, however, transcends the different cultural narratives that are alluded to within it and the idiom of the novel is again peculiar to that novel. In other words, both Carter and Rushdie can be said to have carried out the dual practice Bayard discusses: first entering into the collective library made available by different cultural narratives, and then in effect unreading them during the process of creating their own work. Fury, coming at a different stage of Rushdie’s career, has a different relationship to the collective library that precedes it. Because it takes place mainly in the expository mode, the narrative idiom of the fiction is unable to transcend the specificities of the different cultural traditions it embraces. As a result of this the narrative proper cannot unread those other narratives and instead is actually overwhelmed and unread by them. Relative to Midnight’s Children, Fury embodies a return of the repressed articulated via a re-​expression of the traditions existing in the collective library. In Bayard’s account, as in Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (which will be discussed in the following chapter), the capacity of the prior tradition to overwhelm the novelist as novelist is threatening for the authorial self and must be guarded against. On the other hand, Cochran’s insight into the different stages that comprise a career suggests that when new career stages open up, this need not necessarily be due to an experience of threatening disequilibrium and may merely be the result of a different decision-​making process. The stages in question here could be characterized as entrance into the collective library; unreading to develop an individual idiom; and then the return of the collective tradition in stronger and starker tones than it had earlier been expressed. Each stage is discernible in the work of Rushdie and Carter’s contemporary, A. S. Byatt. Like Wise Children, Byatt’s best-​known work, Possession (1990), is a novel that exists in the tradition of English romance, which it also partly expands and transforms. Its narrative of the tragically fore-​shortened love affair between the mighty (but fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and the younger

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female writer Christabel LaMotte appears to have been inspired to some extent by the lives of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. Its simultaneous narrative of the work of Roland and Maud, the twentieth-​century scholars researching the lives of Ash and LaMotte, elevates the novel into the realm of metafiction, on which its reputation mainly rests. The text comprises numerous different levels of signification expressed through different kinds of textual fragments:  extracts from work purportedly by either Ash or Lamotte, letters between them, scholarly articles about them –​ complete with appendices, footnotes, prefaces and the full range of paratextual apparatus identified by Genette. The mediating presence of these distinct kinds of textual artefacts within the texture of the novel has the effect of rendering its world doubly fictive because it fictionalizes both the field of romantic poetry and the means by which contemporary readers access that field in the present. But for all the paratextual emanations, Possession rarely slides over into exposition. The apparent presence of lectures, critical summaries, annotations and explanations all ironically contribute to the text’s signalling of its own fictive status and as such, the narrative thread is not overwhelmed by the tradition in which it locates itself. In this sense, the tradition is unread by the text. Because Possession is about both two Victorian poets and the modern researchers investigating their lives, there is a strong synergy between the two sets of protagonists. The same can be said to a large extent of the first novel in Byatt’s Frederica Potter tetralogy, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), which is both about the virgin Queen Elizabeth I and the girl (Frederica) playing that queen in a play. In other words, the virgin of the title refers to these two different people separately, and also to the same person who embodies them both simultaneously. We might say that Frederica (an avatar of Byatt herself) is the main protagonist in both the fiction and the fiction-​within-​the-​fiction. The second part of Byatt’s tetralogy, Still Life (1985) also made use of a play within the novel. This time, however, the character Frederica was not the main actress in that play, so that a separate character had to be introduced and the simultaneous embodiment in one character of two different roles was not possible. This disabled the synergetic relationship between protagonist in the fiction and protagonist in the drama that was created in The Virgin in the Garden, and means that Still Life cannot really be considered a metafictive work. A similar divergence occurs in the third instalment of the series, Babel Tower (1997), which is partly about the loosening of conventional sexual and social morés during the 1960s, represented by Frederica’s divorce, her sexual relationships and her unconventional attempt to support herself as a single mother

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by teaching literature classes and assessing draft manuscripts for a publisher. Although Frederica’s work is obviously important to the themes of the novel, it also throws up the main structural challenge of it. For example, in Byatt’s portrayal of the course Frederica teaches on the history of the English novel, long sections of lectures about unity and harmony in Lawrence’s Women in Love and Forster’s Howard’s End are included alongside lengthy extracts from the novels themselves. This inclusion of lecture material in a work of fiction feels clunky and resistant of reader enjoyment. Frederica recommends that her publisher should publish two of the manuscripts she has read: Daily Bread (a work about the serious daily life of a clergyman’s wife, by Phyllis Pratt) and Babbletower by the art school drop-​out Jude Mason. Both of these are excerpted at length in Babel Tower, especially Babbletower, which appears to be a novel about an alternative society in revolutionary France, based ostensibly on complete sexual freedom, although that freedom appears not to include the right for women to say no to men’s advances. Jude’s characters Mavis and Lady Roseace both suffer violent deaths as a result of resisting. These lengthy extracts that are posited within the novel but existing on distinct cognitive plains create a sense of dissolution rather than of closely contracting narrative strands. The slight verbal distinction between the name of the novel readers hold in their hands, Babel Tower, and that of the separate work posited within it, Babbletower, recapitulates the technique that was discussed in Chapter 3: Babel Tower, like Lott’s Seymour Tapes, posits the existence of a separate novel with which it almost shares a name and to which it is evidently thematically related but which is nevertheless distinct within it. Moreover, this distinction means that Babel Tower contains not merely a novel-​within-​a-​novel, but novels-​within-​novels-​within-​novels. This extra layer of textual cognition brings the novel to the level of second-​order metafiction that was defined in Chapter 4. To some extent, the lecturing style that characterizes Babel Tower represents the return of the collective library that Byatt had unread in The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Possession (1990). What redeems Babel Tower (1997) as art, in contrast to mere exegesis of other art, is that the lectures that dominate the fiction reveal a degree of congruence with it. Although Byatt puts into the mouth of her narrator lengthy lectures by Frederica about Forster and Lawrence, the climactic moment of the novel is the trial (for obscenity) of Jude Mason’s work Babbletower. The fictional trial in turn is clearly inspired by that of Lawrence’s own Lady Chatterley’s Lover so that the result of including a fictive allusion to it at the climactic moment of the text is that the laboured lectures about Forster

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and Lawrence that had come earlier retrospectively seem the more important. In other words, it is not merely a matter of the collective library entirely overwhelming the narrative thread of the fiction, but of that library returning in a way that supports and consolidates its own central preoccupations. Just as Rushdie’s retrospective novel Fury expresses a more explicit return of the cultural narratives that had been integrated and so merely latent within his earlier work, so too the same thing happens in Byatt’s most profoundly retrospective work, A Whistling Woman (2002). A Whistling Woman is the fourth and final novel in the Frederica sequence, published twenty years after The Virgin in the Garden. Each of the novels can be seen as works of autofiction in that Byatt transmogrifies different stages of her own life into different periods of Frederica’s. Thus we can apply what Maroula Joannou said of Byatt’s sister and fellow novelist Margaret Drabble to Byatt herself, that her ‘women protagonists got older as the novelist aged herself ’.38 This does not mean that the novels are straightforwardly autobiographical, but does imply that the relatively long temporal interlude between publication of each volume was a significant aspect of that volume’s genesis and genealogy and was in fact one of the most innovative features of the sequence as a whole. It extends Roger Grenier’s highly original distinction between the definitions of a novel and a short story on the basis of ‘the experience of the author’ (as opposed to any structural or formalist feature) into a comparable distinction between a single novel and a continuing series.39 A Whistling Woman consists of three narrative strands:  Frederica’s move from college teaching into a new television career, the student protests of the 1960s expressed by the establishment of an ‘anti-​university’ outside the North Yorkshire University during an important conference there on ‘Body and Mind’ and the creation by Dr Elvet Gander of a quasi-​religious commune at Dun Vale Hall on the other side of the Yorkshire Moors, which is only broken up after a series of tragedies. It is also a retrospective work in a number of significant ways. This is partly because it is a novel about memory and remembering past events in Frederica’s life. However, it doesn’t do this in a straightforward way and ironically  –​for a novel of retrospection  –​there are several instances where Byatt employs a future tense, narrating what Frederica would remember in old age of the turbulent events of the 1960s. It is a somewhat discordant technique in a novel that is mainly looking back at the past rather than anticipating the future, and is one of the many ways in which the text wrong-​foots the reader and creates a challenging reading experience. Second, A Whistling Woman evinces the stylistic harshness that Edward Said associates with uncompromising late-​career fictions more generally. Its

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emotional intensity is unremittingly severe, making many of the characters seem not merely comical –​that was always a part of Byatt’s satirical practice –​ but also openly savage and unflattering, even to themselves. Frederica at times is no more attractive than the men who manipulate her, the scientists John Ottokar and Luk Lysgaard-​Peacock. The female scientist Jacqueline Winwar provides a variation on the central dilemma Byatt associates with Frederica: how to be taken seriously as a woman and an intellectual in a field dominated by men. When she starts postdoctoral research under Professor Lyon Bowman, she ends up far more resentful of his passing her research findings off as his own than of his seduction of her which she sees as merely a means to advance a particular stage in her career. In other words, neither Jacqueline nor Lyon come out of it any more flatteringly than Luk or Frederica. It is as if the central tendency of the novel is to reveal men and women not as merely loving though flawed, but in their stark hostility and hypocrisy and failure. Above all, A Whistling Woman expresses its embodiment of stylistic belatedness through the entanglement of its narrative proper in a series of what Said refers to as ‘resistant media’.40 Bayard’s collective library consists of all the texts on all the subjects in all the disciplines ever written and Byatt’s inner library, unlike that of Angela Carter, is thoroughly eclectic. The mathematical theorem, the public psychology lecture, long discourses on Christian and Manichean theology, Freudian theory, Kierkegaardian philosophy: all are expounded in detail and at length. That is, rather than portraying or illustrating the ideas associated with these fields in one or more fictional relationships, the ideas themselves are distanced from the fictive world and refuse to be accommodated in abstraction or allegory. This refusal is tantamount to a denial of the business of fictionalization, that is, of the process by which fiction fictionalizes, and propels the novel beyond the realm of prose fiction as such. When this happens, all those complex and competing pre-​existing discourses overwhelm and subsume the narrative trajectory of the fiction within their own discursive spaces. The novel as novel is only minimally able to peep out from those spaces and the text as creative art performs its own unmaking. It is as though Byatt has entered into the collective library in order to ensure that as much readerly attention is paid to the texts that are found there as to her own text. Those diverse texts that she has previously read and the diverse media she has read them in re-​enter her inner library during subsequent stages of her career as reader because as we know from Bayard, the career of the reader constitutes also her career as author. That is to say, the retrospective stage of Byatt’s career comes about not only when the final book in the sequence is written, but when the inner library returns in the form of her

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own final inner book. A Whistling Woman deals as much in those other forms and media as it does in its writer’s primary narrative and Byatt as author is effectively unmade by them.

Notes 1 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 43. 2 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 99. 3 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 32. 4 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 57. 5 Ibid., p. 18. 6 Ibid., p. 85, emphasis added. 7 Ibid., p. 25. 8 Ibid., p. 141. 9 Ibid., p. 124. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 125. 12 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 104. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 14 Ibid. 15 Jean Guichard, Jacques Pouyard and Bernadette Dumora, ‘Self-​Identity Construction and Reflexivity’, in Career Counseling and Constructivism, ed. Mary McMahon and Mark Watson, p. 70. 16 Maree, Counselling for Career Construction, p. 4. 17 Ibid., p. 17. 18 Pierre Bayard, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Granta, 2008), p. 12. 19 Ibid., p. 9. 20 Ibid., p. 46. 21 Ibid., p. 53. 22 Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of, p. 123. 23 Bayard, How to Talk, p. 54. 24 Ibid., p. 55. 25 Ibid., p. 86. 26 Clarke Rountree, Venomous Speech: Problems with American Political Discourse on the Right and Left (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), p. 32. 27 Bayard, How to Talk, p. 85. 28 Ibid., p. 125. 29 Ibid., p. 180.

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30 Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 6. 31 Carter, Wise Children, p. 161. 32 Ibid., p. 208. 33 For a consideration of how both the definition and content of literary history are themselves amenable to modification and change over time see Margit Sichert, ‘The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History of English Literature after Postmodernism’, in Postmodernism and after: Visions and Revisions, ed. Regina Rudaityté (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 121–​35. 34 Cochran, Career Counseling: A Narrative Approach, p. 137. 35 Ibid., p. 138. 36 Ibid., p. 133. 37 Salman Rushdie, Fury (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), p. 251. 38 Maroula Joannou, ‘The Grandes Dames: Writers of Longevity’, in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970–​Present. Volume Ten, ed. Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 106. 39 Grenier, Palace of Books, p. 88. 40 Said, On Late Style, p. 114.

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Feeding Fiction Forward: Anxieties of Influence

One of the major theorists of the relationship between literary production and the prior literary tradition discussed in Chapter 5 is Harold Bloom. However, Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) has fallen into a state of relative critical disregard in recent years. The purpose of Chapter 6 is to restore the relevance of Bloom’s ideas about literary careers to contemporary view through a critical reading of his work and an application of it to analysis of contemporary fictional practices. Bloom identifies six ‘revisionary ratios’ by which writers are able to grapple with the styles, idioms, themes and techniques of significant literary forebears and reincorporate them into their own work. The first three of these are Clinamen (a ‘swerve’ or change of direction), Tessera (‘completing’ the work of a predecessor) and Kenosis (feeding prior ideas forward in a new idiom). Through an initial summary of these three ratios, I will explore different ways in which authors might change direction mid-​career, with examples in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro and Marina Lewycka; Anthony Horowitz and Sebastian Faulks; and Salman Rushdie, respectively. Having done so, the chapter will go on to expound an important theoretical critique of Bloom’s work by identifying a methodological blind spot in his thinking: on the one hand, his ephebe (or aspiring writer) is always discussed as if he is just starting out on the path towards a career in writing. On the other, some of the different revisionary ratios are more applicable to certain career stages than others. The contradiction will be made more evident in my discussion of Bloom’s latter three ratios: Daemonization (‘putting in place’), Askesis (‘authorial super ego’) and Apophrades (‘return of the dead’). Bloom’s aspiring writer appears to be at the start of a poetic career; but as The Anxiety of Influence progresses it becomes clear that at certain times he is also understood to have made more progress in the course of that career than

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at others. It will be argued here that this temporal contradiction can be resolved by adding a seventh revisionary ratio to Bloom’s original six: the ratio of self-​ retrospect. Once this theoretical step is taken, the chapter will argue, it becomes possible to identify the six ratios originally suggested by Bloom as discrete sequences within the overall structure of an author’s career, where the aspiring author has to address not only the existence of a prior literary tradition but also the existence of his or her own earlier work in order to develop an original style specific to his or her retrospective stage. Implicit in this possibility will be the suggestion that the three ratios to be discussed in the first half of the chapter belong to the early-​or mid-​career stages and that the final three ratios are best understood as belonging to the latter stages of a career. That is to say, the addition of a seventh ratio to Bloom’s original six will bring the notion of the retrospective stage in a written career into focus much more strongly than it is in Bloom’s own work through the adumbration of a notion of retrospective self-​ analysis that is only possible once this chronology has been established as such. These theoretical ideas will be illustrated with reference to V. S. Naipaul’s final novel Magic Seeds (2004), J. G. Ballard’s penultimate novel Millennium People (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and A. S. Byatt’s Virgin in the Garden (1978). In different ways, these texts revise the impression of an authorial self evinced by their authors’ earlier works, so that when Bloom’s taxonomy of different revisionary ratios is expanded to include a ratio of self-​retrospect, The Anxiety of Influence can be read as an important work on how we understand and construct contemporary literary careers.

Harold Bloom’s poetic self Bloom’s central assumption in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) is that modern poets have inherited a form of melancholy engendered by the imaginative wealth of what preceded them, compared to which they seem insignificant. He opens the study by comparing separate claims to originality made by Oscar Wilde and Wallace Stevens, each of whom asserted that as consummate artists they were beyond the reach of prior influence. Rather than take these claims at face value, however, Bloom took the extent to which they denied external influence as an ironic counter-​factual indication that the possibility of having been artistically influenced by their predecessors was a deep source of anxiety to both. The same was true for all of their contemporaries. Thus Bloom argues that enlightenment poetry could not be as good as renaissance poetry because the

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renaissance tradition was so strong as to render it always-​already overwhelmed in advance. Romantic poetry could not be as strong as that of the enlightenment; or modernist poetry as good as romantic, for the same reason. This leads him to the possibility that the poetic tradition tends towards its own dissolution, and that when it dies it will be self-​slain –​murdered by its own past strength. What he calls the ‘strong’ poet has therefore always to engage in an impossible battle with the strength of the prior tradition: ‘priority in divination is crucial for every strong poet lest he dwindle merely into a latecomer’.1 There are a number of possible criticisms of the concept of a ‘strong’ poet. Along with an implicit gender blindness and masculine bias in the term, there is also an implication that most writers are not ‘strong’ poets (whatever their early potential) and hence there is a tendency to neglect the majority of artists in any given field, as if they are somehow not worthy of critical attention. In other words, Bloom reinforces the process of literary canonization that has been widely critically scrutinized since The Anxiety of Influence appeared in 1973. My aim here is not so much to repeat those criticisms that have already been made of Bloom as it is to return to what is innovative in his work, specifically with regard to the study of literary careers. Bloom uses the classical term ephebe to refer to a hypothetical young aspiring citizen poet who tries to take up the challenge and who may become a ‘strong’ poet in the process. In his account, writing is a means of achieving symbolic immortality, and poets do more than most ordinary people to rebel against the encroaching consciousness of death’s necessity, which means that their battle is antithetical to nature. That is, the ephebe quests for an impossible object just as his precursor(s) quested before him and the struggle as such becomes the dominant theme in his work. Contra Wilde and Stevens, therefore, Bloom reasons that poetical influence is the defining element of all poetry since the renaissance. He makes clear that poets are subject to influences beyond the merely poetic, but it is this latter with which he is chiefly concerned:  the ‘poet in a poet, or the aboriginal poetic self ’.2 The bulk of The Anxiety of Influence is then devoted to developing a taxonomy of six different ‘revisionary ratios’, which is the term Bloom uses for the different kinds of relationships between a contemporary poet and one or more significant precursors. Bloom suggests that the principal challenge for poets in English since the renaissance is that they cannot be as good as Milton but must nevertheless live with the awareness of the necessity of making an impossible attempt. Thus he reads Paradise Lost as an allegory of the dilemma of the modern poet (Satan), with God as his embarrassingly potent and still-​powerful ancestor poet, and Adam

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as the young aspirant or ephebe. Moreover, whereas Adam has Eve as poetic muse and Satan has Sin, God neither has nor needs a muse since as precursor his creative power is manifest only in the past time of the poem, rendering him symbolically dead in the poetic present. For Bloom, God represents to Satan the embarrassment of a creative tradition already too rich to need anything more. Satan’s task is then to rally everything that remains after the fall –​and this is also the task of the modern poet. In other words, the poet ‘is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves’.3 He may feel he has the embryo of a poem in him attempting to get out, but his relationship to the field of poetry as a whole is positioned by other poems both outside and prior to him. He is found by the poems of others, so that to enter the field is to feel the ‘dread of threatened autonomy forever’ (ibid). This is why he argues that the artistic inheritance of all modern poets has become one of melancholy: ‘Poetic influence is thus a disease of self-​consciousness.’4 Bloom’s argument is that the young ephebe cannot afford to be too generous in his recognition of the strength of his precursors’ art –​despite his understanding of that strength –​because to allow the spirit of a precursor to subsume the spirit of his own work within itself would militate against the ephebe’s growth as an autonomous poetic self. The question of how to recognize the strength of the other without overvaluing it to one’s own detriment then shapes and mediates the relationship between the poetry of the precursor and that of the latecomer. Bloom suggests that this relationship is one of intellectual revisionism since it requires that when the ephebe confronts the work of a strong precursor (or ‘great original’), he is obliged to try and find some kind of fault there to justify an act of creative correction.5 The relationship of the later poet to the former is then one of poetic misapprehension, a wilful mis-​taking of the work of the other. This wilful revisionism is what enables the strong poet to deflect anxiety into self-​ saving misprision and is (Bloom suggests) the prime condition without which all poetry since the renaissance could not exist. Bloom calls this deliberate misinterpretation a relationship of clinamen, a swerve in the existing arrangement of matter and a redeployment of the same material in a new configuration. The paradoxical result is that the new poet determines the particular law of the precursor –​in order to swerve from it. For this reason, the Bloomian ‘swerve’ can often be traced to one precise moment or idea or even one particular work within the trajectory of an ephebe’s career: ‘This clinamen between the strong poet and the Poetic Father is made by the whole being of the later poet, and the true history of modern poetry would be the accurate recording of these revisionary swerves.’6

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Among contemporary writers a good example of clinamen, or creative swerve, is The Unconsoled (1995) by Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel preceded in Ishiguro’s oeuvre by An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989). In each of these preceding novels, Ishiguro had portrayed the turbulent history of the 1930s and 1940s from a standpoint after the historical events of the Second World War had already concluded and when the protagonists, Ono the Japanese war artist and Stevens the butler for a British Fascist sympathizer, have seen the things they devoted their lives to become retrospectively and ironically discredited. Each character diverts into a compensatory unreliable mode of narrating history in order to accommodate the trauma of those experiences. One of the most notable features of a comparison between An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989) is how closely the latter re-​ creates in war-​time Britain the same plot that was located in militaristic Japan in the former, creating the feeling of alternative versions of Ishiguro’s own Japanese and British cultural heritage. His choice of an unnamed Eastern European country as the setting for his next, highly experimental novel The Unconsoled (1995) then represents a clear swerve away from the dual heritages that had characterized his earlier output. In contrast to Ishiguro, Marina Lewycka can be said to have ‘swerved’ in the opposite direction during the course of her career as an author –​swerving, that is, away from the Eastern European setting that had dominated her first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005). Lewycka’s more recent novel Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012) uses a Ukrainian girl, Maroushka, as a relatively minor character to symbolize greed in London banking around the time of the 2008 financial crash. As a result, the novel is partly a fable about the economic crisis. Its coverage of this subject is comparable to Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013), which in turn employs the same shift in narrative tense relative to Madden’s earlier novels as that identified in Chapter 2 in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here. All three novels therefore reveal a discernible practice of retrospective fictional self-​recreation on the part of the author as such. In Various Pets Alive and Dead Lewycka renews her authorial self by dismantling the human geography employed in the earlier novel and reconstructing it in a different context. In Bloom’s account, a swerve is a swerve only if it is a swerve away from the direction taken by a great precursor, rather than away from one’s own earlier path. Through their literary swerves both Ishiguro and Lewycka retain thematic material that had dominated their previous output, but also render it more minor than it had been in order to develop new interests. That is, their

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trajectories suggest that a creative swerve can be a means of decentring the central thematic preoccupation that had dominated their own earlier work, not merely that of a precursor. Two important points follow from this. One is that fictions of self-​retrospect are possible when each writer develops a new theme, expressed through a combination of continuity and innovation, or what Said calls the conflict between ‘originality and habit’, which has this sidelining or decentring effect.7 The second, related to that, is that Bloom’s engagement with the retrospective reconstruction of the authorial self becomes more noticeable as The Anxiety of Influence unfolds, even though he never formally conceptualizes the retrospective aspect as such. According to Bloom, a weakness of much critical practice has been to commit one of two common errors. The first of these is tautology, where the poem is taken by the critic to mean no more or less than itself. The second is reductionism, where the poem is taken to be a bearer of meaning, but the critical reconstruction of that meaning is not itself poetic. His reading of poetic history causes him to advocate a new reading practice, which he calls antithetical criticism, in which a different assertion is made beyond tautology or the reductive. It assumes that a poem must mean something, but recognizes that compared to poetic experience the extrapolation of meaning is prosaic. An antithetical critical practice therefore articulates meaning in a form of critical writing that is itself poetic. In other words, it is a practice in which Bloom proposes to juxtapose contrasting ideas within balanced or parallel structures or languages, and where the poet and the critic or analyst often seem to take on characteristics more commonly associated with each other’s roles. In relation to dead poets, the critic is not an ephebe wrestling with the dead, but it is the case that the critic struggles to hear the emotions and experiences of the dead as they experienced them in the first place, across different historical periods. The lifelong relationship of an ephebe to a precursor poet, by contrast, can take the form of a compulsion neurosis: ‘a pattern of saving atonement which, in the process of poetic misprision, becomes a quasi-​ritual that determines the succession of phases in the poetic life-​cycle of strong makers.’8 The antithetical use of the work of a precursor is a different form of poetic misprision from that referred to above as clinamen (or ‘swerving’), and hence implies a different form of relationship between precursor and ephebe. Bloom metaphorically employs Lacan’s term tessera to conceptualize this second kind of revisionary ratio. Classically, the term tessera refers to the tiles of a mosaic or to two or more fragments of broken pottery which might be amenable to reconstruction and hence completion. In poetic tessera, a modern poet perceives the

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work of a precursor to be somehow truncated or unfinished and so supplies in his own writing whatever it is that his imagination tells him would complete that otherwise truncated work. By forming a poetic linkage between the generations, tessera represents the poet’s attempt to persuade himself and his readers that the precursor’s work would be worn out if not renewed and newly fulfilled as the enlarged word of the ephebe. In this way, Bloom’s tessera is a possible response to the challenge that was expressed in the Introduction by the question: once his or her work becomes known for a characteristic theme and/​or idiom, how is it possible for an author to do something different? To Bloom, the aspiring poet identifies a real or imagined shortcoming in the work of one of his predecessors, and by completing that shortfall renders himself complete as a poet. Such an act of completion can be discerned across the different stages in the career of Anthony Horowitz. Having been known primarily as a screenwriter for television police dramas, Horowitz wrote in House of Silk (2011) a Sherlock Holmes novel in which he attempts to recreate the mood, idiom and tone of a mystery by Conan Doyle. That is, he perceived a particular need in the work of his predecessor and as he made the transition from screenwriter to novelist he provided a means of meeting that need and so completed himself as author. This transition from one form of writing to the other need not be rigid or irreversible because the sense of temporal contradiction identified in Bloom’s work above makes one thing clear –​that career stages are not necessarily successive and are in many cases concurrent with each other. In fact, Horowitz continues to work in the domains of both fiction and television drama. A second example of Bloomian ‘completion’ in contemporary British writing is Sebastian Faulks’s novels Devil May Care (2008) and to a lesser extent Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013). In these works, Faulks develops characters and themes created by Ian Fleming and P.  G. Wodehouse respectively. The James Bond novel Devil May Care was commissioned to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Fleming’s birth and both novels are clearly related to the literary poetics of nostalgia, commemoration and ‘postimperial melancholy’ which Ian Baucom argues has been a prominent part of literary culture in England since the end of the British empire.9 In other words, by again identifying a real or perceived shortcoming in the work of a precursor, Faulks completes the oeuvres of the earlier writers and so fulfils his own career vocation. Generally, Bloom says, British writers ‘swerve’ while Americans ‘complete’ because Americans see their precursors as not having dared go far enough. Antithetical criticism starts with the idea that the strong poet cannot be a strong poetic self without the aid of others because this sense of what came before is

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the starting point for poetry. In other words, the ephebe has to realize ‘how long and how profoundly art has been menaced by greater art, and how late our own poets have come in the story’.10 This means that the anxiety of influence can be seen as a poetic version of the Freudian uncanny, positioned not so much by the unknown but by a tradition that has already existed for so long that it has become repressed and is trying to return. Thus the central problem for the latecomer is repetition, raised dialectically to the status of re-​creation as the ephebe’s way of escaping the horror of discovering himself and his work to be a weakened replica of what has gone before. To Freud, repetition was seen primarily as a form of compulsion equating to a psychic defence mechanism in the face of turbulent change threatening the stability of the ego. Bloom is interested in the extent to which the poetic psyche is also burdened by the mechanism of self-​defence that Freud supposed exists to protect it. This is because symbolic repetition and straightforward continuity are themselves antithetical to the articulation of a poetic self and hence undo rather than affirm that self. The sense of a defence mechanism that simultaneously defends and undoes the psyche of the poet leads Bloom to redefine repetition as a process whereby symbolic actions do not merely recur, but break out of their initial context to be recollected forwards. The undoing thus refers to the cancelling out of a prior action rather than to the poetic self as such, which is reinvigorated by the process. In Bloom’s sense, an act of repetition can defend the psyche of the aspiring poet only through this form of undoing that isolates an idea from its original emotional investment and reverses the prior unconscious meaning associated with it so that innovation becomes possible. The feeding forward of an idea through a combination of repetition with discontinuity defines the third of Bloom’s revisionary ratios, that of kenosis. It is a relationship that a poet develops with a precursor when the would-​be poet is so immersed in poetic tradition that he becomes withdrawn from his own contemporary culture. As a poet, he is able to survive this form of isolation by forging a degree of living continuity with poetic tradition, which is the field of poetry as such, provided it does not overwhelm his individual creativity. Gathering past ideas and then recollecting them forwards in a new idiom supplies this continuity by ‘breaking forth into a freshening that yet repeats his precursor’s achievements’.11 To put it another way, kenosis is an emptying of the current imagination that is simultaneously an isolating and undoing with regard to that of a precursor. It is a liberating discontinuity that makes possible the kind of poem that a simple repetition of the work of the precursor could not allow. In other words, kenosis undoes the precursor’s strength in the current poetic self, isolating the

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self from the precursor, and so protects the latecomer from becoming taboo in and to himself. Kenosis is an ambivalent ratio. It brings poems into the realm of antithetical meaning, where the poet’s battle against art has always-​already been lost and he falls into imprisoning time and space even as he undoes the precursor’s pattern by willed loss of continuity. That is, the ephebe takes the stance of the precursor, but that stance is emptied of its priority, so that the poet now holding it becomes more isolated from his fellows and from the continuity of his own poetic self. Kenosis therefore appears to weaken the ephebe’s power but it also diminishes that of the precursor since it is a means by which the ephebe takes the place of the precursor by emptying the precursor of priority and feeding it forward into his own. Perhaps for this reason, Bloom says that kenosis is more identifiable over the course of a lifetime or career than in an individual poem, whereas clinamen or tessera are more discernible in specific works. David Galenson makes a comparable point about the distinction between the career life cycles of what he calls conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. Experimenters such as Dickens, Dostoevsky or Henry James developed their craft gradually and through a continual process of self-​reflexivity, which means they are not exclusively associated with a single work. The careers of conceptual innovators, by contrast, represent moments at which tangible deviations from existing conventions have occurred. These deviations can be traced to specific works such as Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) or Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925).12 How the interplay between existing forms and the articulation of new meaning informs the direction of an author’s career was explored in the previous chapter. There it was argued that the relationship between Salman Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children (1981) and Fury (2001) was one of encroaching abstraction. Although Midnight’s Children employed a magical realist metaphysic in order to allegorize Indian and Pakistani history, those locations were tangible geographical entities. By the time of Fury, by contrast, the combination of magical realism with a materially existing location had been used up and Rushdie was driven to another level of allegory. Thus while the India and Pakistan of Midnight’s Children are concrete locations, the Lilliput-​Blefuscu of Fury is not. The difference between the novels can be understood as a relationship of kenosis. That is, many of the thematic concerns of the earlier novel are recollected forward into the subsequent work, but the strength of the prior is emptied out in the later in a way that safeguards the writer from becoming belated in and to his own work. In other words, kenosis is not only a means of asserting continuity between the

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author and his predecessors by revising them, but also of revising the work of his earlier authorial self in order to recreate himself as author again.

Subject identity formation in an authorial career The Anxiety of Influence has attracted critique from a number of different positions since it was published in 1973. One is that of gender, for as mentioned above there is a strong masculine bias both in Bloom’s critical assumptions and his examples of ‘strong’ poets, which have been equated with an overall gender blindness that provides ‘an inadequate basis for feminist criticism’.13 Another is the claim that The Anxiety of Influence reveals an ‘uncritical allegiance’ to Eurocentric and Western tendencies in literary history through its refusal to examine works from outside Europe and North America.14 This allegiance has been questioned by postcolonial critics such as Paul Breslin, who points out that the ‘literary “master” is all too easily identified with the colonial one’.15 A third is the possibility of questioning why the methodology Bloom employed should be confined solely to the domain of poetry in contrast to other forms of literature, especially prose fiction. Thus Elise Miller has demonstrated that the novels of James Baldwin are notable for the ‘weightiness of his influences’ both with regard to Baldwin’s African American predecessors and those African American writers who came after him.16 Related to that, a fourth is the method’s exclusion of all forms of popular culture. This last area of critique is particularly striking given the critical backdrop in which The Anxiety of Influence was written. Since the 1970s, the critical assumptions that there is an easily discernible canon of great works and that these works alone are worthy of critical attention have been increasingly challenged.17 The Anxiety of Influence evinces little or no critical awareness of this current in literary history and its general tendency is in fact in the opposite direction. This might create the impression of untimeliness in Bloom’s work, a sense of his ideas being out of joint with the emerging critical practices of his own period. However, as I  argued in the Introduction, the 1970s was the period in which literary research and scholarship were starting to address the concept of a literary career as a material artefact amenable to theoretical discussion and analysis in its own right. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to suggest that in the specific field of research into literary careers, Bloom was in tune with those nascent critical developments, giving his work a paradoxical timeliness with regard to those

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other currents that he appeared to neglect. This sense of paradoxical timeliness has important implications for how the ideas expounded in The Anxiety of Influence might, despite the foregoing critiques of them, be pushed forward in a consideration of fictions of self-​retrospect. Although Bloom was not concerned with biographical reconstruction as such, he was interested in the development of the poetic self. The critical question that the whole of The Anxiety of Influence attempts to answer can be summarized succinctly by asking: what makes a poet a poet? Because his answer is that the poet in the poet is positioned by the existing rich tradition of poetry, his conclusion is that this field is the only really appropriate subject for poets to write about. In his account, that is, poetry is the poet’s proper theme. If the criticisms of Bloom discussed above are taken at face value, especially the suggestion that questions of influence can equally be applied to prose fiction as to poetry, there is no reason why this idea of the poetic self should not also be associated with writers of prose fiction. Indeed, the concept of the authorial self that I have used throughout this study is just such an extrapolation of the poetic self. In both cases, straightforward questions of biography are less important than how writers constitute themselves as such through self-​expression and self-​renewal. This implies that writing is the proper theme for authors just as poetry is the proper theme for poets; and not just any writing, but the kind of writing the individual author engages in. The shift from merely narrating a theme to narration itself as a theme is one of the recurring characteristics of career construction. Chapter 2 introduced Peter McIlveen’s notion of life themes, which are defined as the macro-​level stories that collectively constitute the social expression of an objective career. Consistent with the field of career counselling more generally, McIlveen employs concepts of authorship both as a suggestive controlling metaphor and as a tangible method in practice. Metaphorically speaking, McIlveen’s client in career counselling is the ‘autobiographer’ of those stories that comprise his or her life themes, with the counsellor as his or her ‘reader’.18 The utility of this method is for the client to conceive of his or her past self ‘seeing or hearing into the future at what he/​ she had become and to provide commentary to the current self ’.19 It thus generates a conversation between different temporal aspects of the same overall self in which the self considers his personae from two distinct perspectives. In other words, narrative counselling combines two facets of authorship, metaphor and critical practice. Or as Del Corso and Rehfuss put it, the life theme identified in the career narrative ‘animates the movement to become complete in one’s life story’.20 A new career stage might have opened up, but continuity and a sense of

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fulfilment are provided by a macro-​level narrative that transcends the different stages. This is certainly true of an authorial self, where autobiographical narrative is defined less by this or that empirical fact in the author’s biographic history, and more by the literary, artistic and creative choices taken by that author at different points in his or her career as author. This is why the Bloomian ratios enhance our understanding of the components of an authorial career and hence of fictions produced during the retrospective stage of that career. The author defines himself as author through his mobilization of authorship as a theme in its own right, just as the poet constitutes his own poetic self by taking poetry as a theme rather than merely as an expression of a separate theme. In a paper closely related to McIlveen’s, Jean Guichard, Jacques Pouyaud and Bernadette Dumora argue that advanced career reflection involves a three-​way interplay between the ‘I’ who reflects, the ‘you’ who asks questions (the counsellor) and the third person ‘he or she’ whose perspective is discussed by the ‘I’. Of course, in this case the ‘he’ under discussion is another means by which the client constructs and externalizes his subjectivity, which Chapter 2 argued occurs when authors tap into their idea of the audience, and their audience’s idea of them. In other words, as with McIlveen’s temporal bridging between two diachronic selves, conceptualizing ‘I’ as ‘he’ provides a means by which the client can talk about himself from the outside: ‘This reflexivity is a way of distancing oneself from the different experiences encountered and their immediate meaning. It is translated by the production of new interpretants … of these various experiences’.21 This means that because the element of introspection is important in an individual’s career development, career construction cannot be limited to traditional questions about educational attainment and skills. Instead, it should enable clients to re-​examine their sense of self from different viewpoints and different temporal perspectives through stories, thereby developing the critical capacity for meta-​reflection about their own experiences in the narration of new career chapters. This is why Chapter 3 argued that the new interpretation of an authorial self enabled by the interplay of ‘I’ and ‘he’ characterized the retrospective work of Tim Lott, Julian Barnes and Shūsaku Endō. Guichard, Pouyaud and Dumora identify a clear distinction between the career chapters that can be authored at different life stages. They understand this distinction not only through reference to the different degrees of experience or different levels of skill and knowledge that are accumulated at different life stages (although these things clearly are relevant) but also through the different qualitative relationship an individual has with a career counsellor at different

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times. In practice, they suggest, the business of career counsellors is to guide the client through the process of ‘Subjective Identity Formation’ in order to attain a higher level of self-​awareness.22 This is achieved both through self-​reflection and through the mutual development of a suitable vocabulary for the expression of complex thoughts on the part of the (as-​yet) relatively inarticulate client. In this sense the client is somewhat congruent with Bloom’s young ephebe, the aspiring would-​be writer of his or her own career story.

From daemonization to the return of the dead As the culmination of Bloom’s first three revisionary ratios, kenosis is more readily discernible in the course of a writer’s career than in any single work produced during that career. This is both because the poetic power of the precursor is diminished in the work of the ephebe, and because kenosis leaves the poet isolated from the field of poetry and hence from the continuity of an aboriginal poetic self. In the case of Rushdie’s Fury, the relationship in question is not a question of how the artist responds to the work of a great precursor, but of how that artist responds to the danger of becoming entrapped in his own prior work. This only makes sense as a revisionary ratio if anxieties over influence can be understood as a means of articulating authorial self-​retrospection. As noted above, as The Anxiety of Influence progresses this retrospective aspect becomes more apparent without ever being fully theorized by Bloom. For example, Bloom defines his fourth revisionary ration, daemonization, through contradistinction with the Freudian notion of the return of the repressed. To Freud, repression is not necessarily a healthy thing and must be outed for the benefit of the psyche. Bloom’s contrasting argument about the anxiety of influence is that knowledge of a great precursor must somehow be repressed for the ephebe to become a poet. In other words, whatever has been repressed cannot be liberated in the psyche of the poet because poetry in the sense of creativity is possible only by repressing what already exists, even though what already exists provides the main resources for the poet as such. Or, whereas Freud posits a linear development of the id, ego and super-​ego, the poet (as poet) cannot accept this development because he cannot allow himself to be censored by society (as per the super-​ego). So for the poet as poet, this development instead progresses backwards, starting in the society around the poet and reaching back to undo the power of the antecedent: ‘[W]‌here my poetic father’s I was, there it shall be.’23 This suggests that daemonization is a way of putting

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the great precursor in his place. It is a revisionary ratio wherein the precursor’s power is expanded ‘to a principle larger than his own’.24 The effect of this is that the ephebe becomes more of a daemon and the precursor more of a (mere) man. The precursor is ‘reduced’ to his period or society and so de-​individuated: ‘The function of daemonization is rightly to augment repression, by absorbing the precursor more thoroughly into tradition than his own courageous individuation should allow him to be absorbed.’25 A clear instance of daemonization in fiction is the relationship between V. S. Naipaul’s early and late novels A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Magic Seeds (2004) discussed in Chapter 4. In each novel, Naipaul uses the metaphor of the house to symbolize the economic aspirations of a postcolonial subject. In the former, however, the house is a tangible concrete ambition whereas in the latter the housing market as a whole has taken on the magical, allegorical dimension of fairy tale: the London market is a property beanstalk. A House for Mr Biswas is situated immediately before Trinidadian independence whereas Magic Seeds evokes a very different historical and geographical location fifty years later. If daemonization is a way of addressing the artist’s knowledge of his predecessor by superseding that knowledge, Magic Seeds is a daemonic novel with regard to A House for Mr Biswas because the first phase of postcolonial history, so important in the former novel, is sloughed off. Despite the considerable thematic continuity between the texts, the earlier novel is put firmly back in its own place by the later. This again makes sense as a revisionary ratio only if the implicit element of individual retrospection is added to the definition of the ratio itself. Naipaul has attempted to consign his predecessor to an earlier stage of history, even though that predecessor was a prior incarnation of his own authorial self. This unacknowledged element of looking back implies that there is an unresolved sequential tension in the work of Bloom. On the one hand, the ephebe is an aspiring would-​be poet, always starting out on the path towards a mature poetic self. On the other hand, there is a tendency in Bloom to discuss the different ratios of influence as distinct stages in a poetic career, which the ephebe must move through in a given order. But if the stages come in a distinct sequence, some must come later than others and it is hard to see how the ephebe can be always at the beginning. This would suggest that although the ephebe is always starting out on the path, he starts further along it at some stages than at others. This sequential tension leads Bloom to argue that modern poetry –​and all poetry since the renaissance –​has been both a loss and a decline. As a result of this fall, the poetic soul becomes self-​estranged because it has tried to estrange not only all precursors, but also their worlds –​which are the worlds of poetry

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per se. In other words, becoming a poet requires taking up the resources laid down by the prior poetic tradition, and yet innovation and creativity require that the aspiring poet refuse them. Useful surrender to this paradox, Bloom argues, requires some kind of sacrifice or curtailment of the poet as poet. In daemonization, the strong poet can escape the censorship of the super-​ego by reversing the Freudian narrative of development and working backwards from it. For the self-​ sacrificing poet, this is not possible and instead surrendering to such censorship becomes necessary. Such a reduction in the poetic self is effected by Bloom’s fifth revisionary ratio: askesis. Askesis is a poetic equivalent of Freudian sublimation, a means of elaborating upon the guilt of indebtedness to one or more precursors. It is expressed as a purgatorial blinding or veiling that diminishes all other, prior selves allowing a new individual harshness to emerge, rhetorically isolationist and solipsistic. The final product of the process of askesis is the formation of an imaginative equivalent of a super-​ego, a fully developed poetic will ‘harsher than conscience’ that shows that the mature poet has been able to internalize his aggressiveness with regard to his precursors.26 But implicitly, veiling the self to all others is also to veil the self from the field of poetry as a whole. For this reason, Bloom argues that the diminishment of others is also a diminishment of the poetic self. Moreover, it is the kind of diminishment that is likely to arise late in a poetic career. After attempting kenosis, askesis comes next. Or, where clinamen and tessera try to correct or complete the dead, and kenosis and daemonization try to repress memory of the dead, askesis is a match to the death with the dead. Because of this mutual diminishment, it is the process whereby modern poetry as such is ‘self slain’.27 Askesis is a surprisingly quantitative ratio. It enumerates the works in the tradition that precedes it and reckons their value against one present work. It counts the ephebe as lone or few in number with regard to the great strength of the composite precursor who embodies the field, but also reduces the individual precursors of whom the composite is comprised to specific moments of finite, anterior linear time that is now concluded and cannot be revisited. It is during the measurable time that constitutes an unfolding career that the ephebe hopes to gain and demonstrate a poetic autonomy, but that autonomy is always-​already tainted by time itself in the form of the return of the composite precursor. Askesis for this reason tells ‘a lie against the truth of time’.28 On the one hand it offers to define the single-​mindedness of a clear artistic vision, and to situate the achievement of that vision within a mature stage in the poet’s life cycle, hence repeating the assumption of a career as consisting of a series of minor and major phases that was critiqued in the Introduction. On the other

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hand, that same single-​mindedness remains ‘ravaged by others’ and brings the ephebe continually back to his starting point.29 Many of the detailed examples of askesis Bloom gives support the idea that it occurs late in a career: Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s ‘Home at Grasmere’ (published posthumously in 1888), Keats’s Fall of Hyperion (abandoned before Keats’s death in 1821), Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’ (1855), Yeats’s final poem ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ (1939) and, above all, the late work of Wallace Stevens. A clearer example of askesis in recent fiction can be seen by considering J. G. Ballard’s penultimate novel Millennium People (2003) alongside his earlier, seminal work High-​Rise (1975). In High-​Rise (1975) the residents of an up-​market London apartment building revert to a primitive tribal state. Wives and husbands abandon each other and people abandon their apartments to form gangs and clans. As the relationships cease to function so too does the building itself: the electricity, water and air conditioning all fail. In its microcosm of an atavistic dystopian order located within the swish hi-​tech architectural elegance of the tower, High-​Rise recalls the conflicts for power and authority of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or Orwell’s 1984 (1949). By situating the conflict and breakdown in social and sexual relationships within the liminal space of the building, Ballard creates a test ground for the constructs upon which Western civilization is based. In this sense Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) or Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) are more appropriate touchstones. Millennium People (2003), by contrast, veils itself from all of these elements in the dystopian tradition. It too portrays a crisis in bourgeois civilization and an attempt to shock the people who make up that civilization out of their staid existence. But the visceral power of sexual and social atavism that lies at the centre of High-​Rise has become in Millennium People more closely associated with satire and parody. Whereas the tower block of High-​Rise can be seen as a direct continuation of Conrad’s jungle or Golding’s island, the picture-​postcard London that is the setting for middle-​class anxiety in Millennium People cannot be seen as microcosmic of something else because it so squarely insists on its own identity. Whereas the kenosis of Rushdie’s Fury and the daemonization of Naipaul’s Magic Seeds represent a gradual move towards abstraction, Ballard’s askesis moves in the opposite direction, from the abstractly metaphoric towards a harsh insistence on the absolute singularity of location. In this way, Ballard blinkers himself both from the tone of his earlier work and from the field of dystopian writing more generally. He is again his own precursor, and his preceding self is one whom he must overcome.

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The retrospective ratio I have suggested here that although Bloom’s commitment to a canon of high art and his implicit neglect of non-​canonical cultural forms set him aside from the primary critical and theoretical innovations in literary research during the 1970s, his thoughts about the components of a writer’s career aligned him with the nascent development of that sub-​branch of the material study of literature in subtle and indirect ways. On the other hand, I have also suggested that Bloom’s account of the anxiety of influence fails to explore a poet’s relation to his own earlier self as a distinctive kind of priority and hence influence. Only when writing about his final revisionary ratio, apophrades, does Bloom attempt to unify the temporal disjunctions that characterize his definitions of the other categories. According to Bloom, if the ephebe fails to develop a distinctive idiom sufficiently strongly, his work is liable to remain underscored with the hallmark of a great original. For Bloom’s notional ‘strong’ poet though, the opposite can happen: the contemporary artist so thoroughly incorporates the idiom of a great original into his own style that instead of evincing the impression of imitating the precursor, he retrospectively evokes a feeling of having been imitated by him. By this Bloom means that the strong poet at the height of his power is so effective a master of his craft that when we reread the work of his forebears after reading his own, they seem to have changed in a way that would not have been possible had we not read the later work: ‘having so stationed the precursor, in one’s own, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one’s own advent, but rather to be indebted to one’s own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one’s own splendour.’30 Bloom does not interrogate the assumption that a poetic career comprises a number of successive minor phases followed by a period of more significant achievement, followed in turn by decline. As a result, he considers that apophrades is only possible for a strong poet at the mature stage of his work –​not for a young ephebe. As a result, the final section of The Anxiety of Influence contains its fullest statement that the different revisionary ratios are to be seen as distinct temporal stages of a poet’s life cycle. Bloom finds the dead imitating the voice of a later precursor in the best of John Ashbery with regard to Wallace Stevens: ‘where the early Ashbery attempted vainly to soften his poetic father, the mature Ashbery of “Fragment” subverts and even captures the precursor even as he appears to accept him more fully. The ephebe may still not be mentioned in the father’s minutes, but his own vision has advanced.’31

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Bloom’s discussion of the ‘return’ of Stevens in the idiom of the ‘mature’ Ashbery finally makes explicit what is latent throughout The Anxiety of Influence: the idea of successive temporal stages in a writer’s career. In Bloom’s account, to identify these stages is also to make a critical value judgement about each. The early work cannot be as good as the ‘mature’ work, and implicitly, the ‘mature’ is both the best and the last. How we would think about these things if we had a more nuanced sense of what comes after the mature stage; or if we stopped thinking about career stages as mainly determined by chronological, biological age; or again if we changed how we define the ‘best’ work, are then open questions. In effect, Bloom reasons, poets engage in a lifetime of impossible effort with only the very strongest achieving anything significant, whereupon they simply stop. The blind spot in this thinking lies in the fact that hardly any writers do stop there. As discussed in the Introduction, Said associated the fourth stage in the career of the writer with the passing of the high point of innovation and a decline in both creativity and aesthetic quality. However, Said sensed more acutely than Bloom that since most authors feel compelled to go on working until the final end, very few of them consciously retire, even if critical opinion has decided that their best work is behind them. Said’s whole argument in Beginnings (1975) is that the twentieth century represented a major shift from writing as an artistic vocation to writing as a professional career. This account is too simplistic because it fails to address the career constructivist notion of a vocation existing in our own time. It does not account for the fact that well into the twentieth (and indeed, the twenty-​first) century, writers cannot consider their writing a profession as such until it has been achieved. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are among the most popularly and commercially successful novels of our time, but when she sat in coffee shops writing the first one she had no way of knowing that this was going to be the case. In other words, pace Said, writing even in the twenty-​first century remains a vocation rather than a profession during the early-​career stages. Two things then need to be added to Said’s account. First, that in Said’s ill-​ defined ‘late’ stage, when the market has decided that the writer in question is no longer as marketable as he once was but when he nevertheless carries on writing anyway, the activity returns to the status of a vocation that Said associated with writing prior to the twentieth century. Second, the critique of Said that was made in the Introduction raised the possibility that there is no necessary reason for approaching career stages as inherently successive or mutually exclusive. If career stages are defined less as stretches of time and more as things that

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happen in stretches of time, plus the value that is attached to them, then career stages need not be defined in this linear, chronological and discrete way and it becomes possible to see that the stages overlap and interrelate. This critique can also be made of Bloom’s implicit commitment to a linear career trajectory in The Anxiety of Influence. To add a ratio of self-​retrospect to the six revisionary ratios Bloom defined is therefore also to identify an extra discrete ‘stage’ in a literary career beyond those existing temporal stages that Bloom has already defined:  early and mature work. To make this suggestion is partly to subject Bloom’s work to a critique of his own methods –​most notably that of tessera, or completing his work with this extra stage that is absent in his own. If we read David Mitchell’s highly innovative novel Cloud Atlas (2004) having already read his earlier and less critically successful Ghostwritten (1999), it is possible to see a revisionary self-​retrospective process at work. This is because although we cannot assume that a reader will follow the works within an authorial oeuvre in the order they were first written in, the concept of apophrades complicates even the assumption that the author himself writes in that order. This is not to suggest some magical or irrational retrospective rewrite of the chronological sequence of events; but to suggest that when we go back to the former after reading the latter, the former itself seems to have changed. A dynamic process of critical self-​interrogation, that is, a form of apophrades, has taken place. The change does not necessarily proceed from the first written work to the later, as in the empirical chronology of the writer’s life as writer, but moves also in the opposite direction. To go from Ghostwritten (1999) to Cloud Atlas (2004) and then back to Ghostwritten again is to feel not only that Ghostwritten is an early attempt at a more effective literary practice that would subsequently come to fruition in Cloud Atlas, but that the latent achievement of Ghostwritten itself comes to fruition as a result of our having returned to it. That is, elements of the plot, structure and narrative voice of Ghostwritten are so thoroughly subsumed by Cloud Atlas that it feels hard to read Ghostwritten without being reminded of something that, from its temporal perspective, existed in the future. Because it has this capacity to remember the future in advance, in a retrospective form of apophrades it is not only the dead who return but also the already living. A better example of this ratio of self-​retrospect is the relationship the A. S. Byatt novels discussed in Chapter 5 extends backwards to her lesser-​known early efforts. Frederica Potter, the heroine of The Virgin in the Garden (1978), is a student at Cambridge during the same years that Byatt herself studied there, and encounters many of the same experiences as her author: the intellectual and sexual excitement, but also the frustration of being surrounded and often bested by

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men. If The Virgin in the Garden can be seen as an autobiographical novel, then Byatt’s early novel The Shadow of the Sun (1964) is not only similarly autobiographical, it can also be understood retrospectively as a prelude to the Frederica Potter quartet. It has a different protagonist, seventeen-​year-​old Anna Severell, who is shortly to experience what Byatt had already experienced herself and what Frederica would subsequently experience in the later novels: moving from a Northern background to the privileged and highly male world of Cambridge and not knowing what to do when she got there. This means that Anna is a prototype Frederica who is in turn an avatar of Byatt herself. To go back from The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Possession (1990) to Byatt’s early novels The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967) is to underline that apophrades implies a retrospective revising not only of earlier writers but also of earlier works by the same writer. One of the themes for which The Virgin in the Garden and Possession have become known is the struggle (in the mid-​twentieth century) for female intellectuals to be taken seriously in academic institutions dominated by men. These same themes were already present in Byatt’s first two novels, The Shadow of the Sun and The Game, but without the postmodern experimentalism and fictive critique of epistemology that came later. Those two early novels were set during the period in which they were written, and although The Virgin in the Garden is set in the same period, it was written twenty-​five years later. In other words, The Virgin in the Garden has an element of retrospection that they lack. On the other hand, the ratio of apophrades tells us that the early novels themselves can seem to change when we return to them after having read the later ones. This is what happens. Returning to them reveals them in a new light, as part of the developing project of a literary career, so that read through the lens of the later work, the earlier two now feel as if they were paradoxically influenced by it. In the new introduction to The Shadow of the Sun written in 1991 that I discussed in Chapter 4, Byatt admits that while writing it at Cambridge between 1954 and 1957 she suffered the age-​old first writer’s problem: she had had few experiences of the world and had little to write about as a result. This may be why The Shadow of the Sun breaks off without Anna apparently deciding between study at Cambridge, a stable but unexciting marriage or the lure of independent overseas travel. The Virgin in the Garden, coming later in Byatt’s career, is able to propel its female lead, Frederica, into several more life stages. In other words, The Shadow of the Sun makes sense not because of the way it informs the subsequent novel The Virgin in the Garden but because of the way it retrospectively seems to have been informed by it. When reread retrospectively, The Shadow of

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the Sun evokes the same capacity to remember the future as Ghostwritten does for Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. By creating in Anna Severell an avatar of Frederica Potter, who was in turn an avatar for the author herself, Byatt developed also a novel form that was autobiographical in the way that only fiction can be. To explore this combination of the autobiographical and the fictive, it is necessary to turn to the recent development of the genre of autofiction.

Notes 1 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 8. 2 Ibid., p. 11. 3 Ibid., p. 26. 4 Ibid., p. 29. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 44. 7 Said, Beginnings, p. 255. 8 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 66. 9 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 164. 10 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 70. 11 Ibid., p. 83. 12 Galenson, Artistic Capital, p. 174. 13 Maggie Humm, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 118. 14 Jaydeep Chakrabarty, Postcolonialism: Canonicity and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Booktango, 2014), unpaginated. 15 Paul Breslin, Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 48. 16 Elise Miller, ‘The “Maw” of Western Culture: James Baldwin and the Anxieties of Influence’, African American Review, 38 (4), 2004, p. 630. 17 See in particular John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989) and Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991). 18 McIlveen, ‘Life Themes in Career Counselling’, p. 74. 19 Ibid., pp. 78–​79. 20 Jennifer Del Corso and Mark C. Rehfuss, ‘The Role of Narrative in Career Construction Theory’, p. 335. 21 Guichard, Pouyaud and Dumora, ‘Self-​Identity Construction and Reflexivity’, p. 61. 22 Ibid. 23 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 110. Emphasis in original.

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The Late-Career Novelist Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid. Ibid., p. 141. Emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 145.

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Autofiction in Theory and Practice

‘Autofiction’ is a term coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in his 1977 novel Fils to refer to a writing practice between fiction and autobiography. Over the course of the subsequent four decades the practice has gained considerable momentum. It has become established as a recognizable genre within the French literary pantheon, with Doubrovsky, Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, Annie Ernaux, Philippe Forest, Dany Laferrière and Camille Laurens among its prime exponents. Over the same period, autofiction has attracted increasing critical scrutiny such that it has become established also as a dynamic field of scholarly research. Indeed, the increase and variety of autofiction scholarship has had the effect of placing the characteristics of the genre itself in question. Vincent Colonna, Marie Darrieussecq, Philippe Gasparini, Jacques Lecarme and others have contributed different kinds of theoretical insights to the emerging field, to the extent that even Doubrovsky himself has used the term with several different potential definitions. So far, English-​language discussion of French theories of autofiction has been relatively limited. A special issue of L’Esprit Créateur edited by Elizabeth H.  Jones in 2009 explored the work and legacy of Doubrovsky specifically. A conference on Autobiography organized by Södertörn University in Sweden in 2014 gave rise to the edited collection Writing the Self: Essays on Autobiography and Autofiction edited by Kerstin Shands et al., marking an initial exploration in English of the theoretical relationship between the two fields, but not quite discussing autofiction as a field in its own right. This gap has the potential to be addressed by the relatively new journal Auto/​Fiction, published in India. Just as there has been little discussion of the French concept in English, so too there has been very little consideration of English-​language writers as themselves practitioners of autofiction. Arnaud Genon treats Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968) as a work of autofiction before the coinage of the term. He also implies that the fiction of Nick Hornby, writer of a critical introduction to

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A Fan’s Notes can itself be seen as autofictive.1 Similarly, in her (untranslated) French language textbook L’Autofiction, Isabelle Grell suggests that the work of Jeannette Winterson can usefully be considered alongside contemporary French works in the genre, especially those of Chloé Delaume and Christine Angot.2 In a chapter comparing the growth in scholarship around crime fiction to the more recent upturn in interest in autofiction, Karen Ferreira-​Meyers cites Julian Barnes as a possible exemplar of each.3 Overall, however, the discussion in English of English-​language works of autofiction has been quite muted. This chapter makes a provisional intervention in the field first through surveying the recurring components of autofiction in theory and then by outlining an initial argument for considering autofiction as a critical field that provides a number of useful tools and resources for analysing retrospective fictions. The definition of fictions of self-​retrospect that has been developed over the preceding pages started with the career constructivist assumption that writers seek to create new forms of writing at new stages in their careers in response to a real or perceived problem. In career counselling, this problem is often a negative experience of a specific workplace or relationship. Indeed, as we will see, many French works of autofiction have been written in the aftermath of some traumatic experience and this is one reason why the notion of autofiction needs to be taken into account when applying career construction theory to specific stages of authorial careers. On the other hand, during the latter stages of authors’ careers, the problem need not be a traumatic experience as such and might simply be seen as the challenge of continuing to write and to innovate. Thus works both of autofiction and fictions of self-​retrospect provide textual spaces in which various authors experiment in a textual practice that addresses the question of not only what it means to go on writing after trauma, but also what it means to go on writing after having already written. By suggesting potential comparative application of these ideas to the works of Tim Lott, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and A. S. Byatt, the chapter offers a preliminary identification of autofiction within the sphere of English-​language writing.

Origin, development and definitions The immediate context for the development of Doubrovsky’s notion of autofiction was Philippe Lejeune’s research into autobiographical writing in the 1970s, and in particular the publication in 1975 of Lejeune’s study Le Pacte

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autobiographique. In it, Lejeune argued that there are two kinds of contracts between the writer of autobiography and his or her reader. The first of these is a referential, or homonymic, pact whereby the narrating ‘I’ of the text shares a name and manifest identity with the central protagonist of the narrative. The second is a confessional relationship based on trust and the bearing of witness, according to which the writer commits to the divulgence of truth and the reader is entitled to believe that everything he or she reads constitutes a faithful and authentic representation of an a priori lived experience on the part of the writer unless clearly told otherwise. This entitlement to assume the revelation of truth naturally includes the right of the reader to assume the correlation of narrator with author, so that the two kinds of contracts are mutually supportive and together make up the autobiographical pact as Lejeune defines it.4 In attempting to define different kinds of autobiographical writing, Lejeune employed the methods of genetic structuralism discussed in Chapter  4 with regard to Gerard Genette. Genette’s taxonomy of different forms of paratext was based on the identification of as many different kinds of paratextual relationships that are theoretically possible as he could envisage, whether or not he was aware of specific textual examples of each kind. The classification comprised a series of tables where certain rows and certain columns could only be filled in theoretically because particular examples of the corresponding form of paratext either did not exist or were not known to Genette himself. They consisted, as it were, of a series of known unknowns. The notion of autofiction was developed by Doubrovsky in exactly this manner. It addresses a known unknown in Lejeune’s thinking on different kinds of autobiographical writing. More specifically, it conceptualizes the possibility of a variant of autobiographical writing that retains both Lejeune’s identification of the narrating ‘I’ with the author in a referential sense and the commitment to telling the truth in a faithful relationship, but combines this with an element of imaginative or creative work that renders the narrating ‘I’ semi-​fictional at the same time that it refers to the external ‘I’. Isabelle Grell says of autofiction: Auto: la matière de son livre est entièrement autobiographique. Fiction: la matière est entièrement romannesque (une vie condense en une journée façon Joyce; narration toujours au present, meme du plus loin passé; courant de conscience, dialogues, forcément fictifs, etc.).5 Auto:  the material of the book is entirely autobiographical. Fiction:  the material is entirely novelistic (expressing a life in a single day in the style of Joyce; present-​tense narration even when dealing with the distant past; stream of consciousness; dialogue; necessary fictions, etc.).

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Although it is far from the whole story (as we shall see), this constitutes a useful initial definition of autofiction as Doubrovsky introduced it: a form of autobiographical writing that incorporates the techniques and characteristics more commonly associated with fiction, especially modernist experimental fiction. Having implicitly added this contentless category to Lejeune’s schemata of different varieties of autobiographical writing, Doubrovsky proceeded to create individual works that could be assimilated to it, so that his work Fils (1977) was the first work of autofiction to declare itself as such. As the critical field has grown and become more elaborate over the past forty years, the outpouring of new works of autofiction has been accompanied by a corresponding critical practice whereby theorists and researchers (some of whom are also involved in creative writing of their own) have participated in the assigning of different works to the category. This has meant, among other things, that it has become retrospectively possible to identify as works of autofiction texts that were created before the term itself was coined, most notably Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (1913) and Colette’s La Naissance du jour (1928). Although research by Isabelle Grell has revealed that Doubrovsky thought of the term ‘autofiction’ as early as 1973 while living, teaching and attending sessions with a psychoanalyst in New York, she has suggested that it would have been unlikely to attain the critical currency that it has subsequently acquired were it not for the context created by Lejeune’s work in 1977.6 Moreover, Doubrovsky himself has frequently attested that although he coined the term, he did not invent the ‘thing’ itself.7 There are four elements that Doubrovsky associates with the practice of autofiction: a homonymic pact between author, narrator and protagonist (as in Lejeune); a commitment to narrating only events that can be considered strictly real; the overt designation of each of his works as novels rather than autobiographies; and an experimental reconfiguration of narrative time that may appear to depart from the chronology of the purely factual. Of these, the first two supply the auto element of autofiction and the third and fourth supply the fictive. If this simultaneous commitment to the strictly real and the novelistic appears contradictory, then it is perhaps through the last element, the reconfiguration of narrative time, that Doubrovsky attempts a form of synthesis and resolution. In his practice of autofiction, his narrating ‘I’ is real but problematic and elusive. It foregrounds the role –​and above all, the pitfalls, shortcomings and limitations –​of memory in the composition of an autobiographical narrative in a way that straightforward forms of biography and autobiography arguably fail to do. In other words, from the perspective of autofiction, conventional forms of biography and autobiography at best fail to interrogate the capacity of

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memory and of the emotions to distort what is being remembered and at worst positively take for granted the reliability of that content. Although certain criticisms of this perhaps simplistic definition of autobiography will be discussed below, autofiction appears to differ from autobiography by treating memory as a much more slippery, troubling and elusive concept. It is a means of fictionalizing the truth precisely because the truth itself can only be half apprehended, glimpsed through the darkness and only ever fleetingly. It draws attention to gaps, discontinuities, breakages and fractures of all kinds within the mind of the narrating ‘I’. It is therefore expressed in a series of literary techniques such as the unreliable narrator, stream of consciousness, sudden shifts in narrative perspective and keeping the reader in the dark rather than the transparently factual techniques we would associate with non-​fiction. In other words, it is above all on a stylistic basis that Doubrovsky differentiates autofiction from autobiography. Hence he defines autofiction as a narrative of which the subject matter is entirely autobiographical, the manner of narration entirely fictive (‘récit dont la matière est entièrement autobiographique, la manière entièrement fictionelle’).8 On the face of it, the reassertion of a defining ‘I’ in fiction seems to be at odds with the strain in French thinking –​post-​structuralism –​that was dominant during the period when the notion of autofiction was introduced. The concept of a stable continuous subject is unsettled if not completely disavowed by post-​structuralist critical theory, and the corresponding critical practice demonstrated readings of texts where the subject, the speaking ‘I’, was always in a state of dissolution and flux. In one of the first studies to situate the genesis of the concept of autofiction historically, generically and institutionally, however, Grell has argued that in a different way, autofiction’s renegotiation of the ‘I’ of the subject was also operative in the French post-​structural nouveau roman of the 1970s, such as those by Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute, where it could no longer be assumed that there was a single coherent subject to represent. Perhaps for this reason, Grell takes a highly original approach to two of the seminal texts of post-​structural theory, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Foucault’s essay ‘What Is an Author?’ Her reading of these texts emphasizes the autobiographical element that their manifest content appears to disavow.9 What emerges is a narrative ‘I’ that can just about be discerned on the one hand, but that is always in question, always in the process of coming into being, on the other. Thus she argues that post-​structuralism is an effective precursor to autofiction. Having made this point, Grell further suggests that three other important contexts for the development of the genre were the growth of psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation, surrealism and structuralism.

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Psychoanalysis, as both a clinical practice and a literary theory, is dedicated to an exploration of dark spaces in the mind, narrative lacunae, cognitive and emotional gaps and the repression of memories of traumatic or troubling experiences. If autobiography is a form that emphasizes narrative continuity and that places its factual content too easily, too unproblematically on the surface, then it is a form that elides those different instances of narrative interstices. One irony of this is that though it is a genre increasingly dedicated to the sensational, it is also a genre that appears to have been little influenced by psychoanalysis where everything is complex, fragmentary, barely discernible and difficult to comprehend. By contrast, autofiction, like career construction, uses a number of challenging narrative techniques to foreground those areas of difficulty. This is why the rapid increase of psychoanalytic forms of literary criticism is one of the important contexts for the development of autofiction. The combination of autobiographical writing with psychoanalytic methods need not lead to a form of weak psychobiography, since it is not a question of psychoanalysing the cognitive or emotional experiences of this or that writer. It is rather a matter of identifying the formal written techniques that autofiction borrows from psychoanalysis. Surrealism too is an art form dedicated to the revelation of what cannot be revealed because it cannot be easily known. It expresses fragmented, often seemingly incompatible figurative elements that cannot be made to cohere easily into a narrative or symbolic whole because the interpretative key that could make them do so, that is the figural consciousness of the subject being represented, is murky, dark, repressed and inaccessible from the outside. Again, therefore, it is a form of visual narrative that tends more towards the stylistic aporia of autofiction than the straightforward documentary practice of autobiography. Grell’s third context for the evolution of the concept of autofiction, that is, structuralism, is perhaps the most surprising of the three. Its emphasis on the impersonal structures of the author function –​as distinct from the author’s individual selfhood –​appears to be diametrically opposed to writing about the self (‘l’écriture du Je’).10 Yet Grell suggests that structuralism is a way of transcending the individual subjectivity of a narrating ‘I’ by recovering and revealing the different social and institutional relationships through which that individual subject is situated. In other words, it too is a way of speaking about ‘I’ while simultaneously thematizing and problematizing the means available for doing so. The ‘I’ of the subject is in question in psychoanalysis and surrealism because it hints at an evasive subjectivity that might never be attained externally. From a different perspective, the ‘I’ of the subject is in question in structuralist theory

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because the subjectivity it expresses is illusory, always-​already overdetermined by the sweeping power structures that position and situate the self. To the three contexts of psychoanalysis, surrealism and structuralism that Grell identifies, there can be added a fourth, that of contemporary interest in confessional narratives, or what Madeleine Ouellette-​Michalska refers to as ‘le culte de la divulgation’.11 In particular, the growth of so-​called ‘reality television’ over the past two decades provides one of the backdrops against which autofiction has developed. Although it appears to offer an immediacy of contact between protagonist and viewer, Bran Nicol points out that the ‘reality’ that is represented is ‘disfigured’, manipulated and stylistically transformed into a different version of itself.12 So it is also in the related confessional genres of magazine journalism, televised soap opera and certain kinds of online narratives, especially blogs. Indeed, these can all be seen as autofictive genres, tending towards spectacular revelation or confession at the same time that they aesthetically transmute the subject of the revelation itself, which thus becomes a subject of active questioning rather than straightforward exposition. The importance of le culte de la divulgation to the practice of autofiction can clearly be seen in Doubrovsky’s work. Doubrovsky has frequently amended and added to the definition of autofiction since coining the term in the 1970s, and one of the ways by which he distinguished autofiction from conventional autobiography was on a sociological basis. He has asserted several times, for example, that he could not write an autobiography because he was a ‘nobody’, whereas only ‘somebodies’ can write autobiographies:  theatre and film stars, politicians and major figures of intellectual history such as Rousseau. In contrast to these stellar figures, Doubrovsky wrote of himself ‘I hardly exist, I am a fictive being’. (‘J’existe à peine, je suis un être fictive.’)13 Thus the contradistinction with the bright stars of the celebrity confessional firmament provides an important context in which autofiction was developed. Moreover, a critical controversy over Doubrovsky’s publication of Le Livre brisé in 1989, when French reviewer Bernard Pivot accused Doubrovsky of murdering his wife in fiction, helped acquire recognition and critical notoriety for the field, and this appears to have had a galvanizing effect, generating further energy and critical momentum. This momentum can perhaps best be sensed through a survey of the different theoretical definitions of autofiction that have subsequently come into existence, the great variety of which is taken by Arnaud Genon as evidence for the vitality of the field as a whole and the successful entry of the form into the overall pantheon of literary genres.14 During the period since publication of Le Livre brisé, for example, Doubrovsky has moved to a different way of reckoning the

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distinction between autofiction and autobiography, as a matter not so much of sociological convention but of historical difference. In the late twentieth and early twenty-​first century, he argues, it is no longer possible to write the kind of autobiography that Rousseau wrote. This is not simply because he is a mere mortal as opposed to a public figure of celebrity however defined, but because historical conditions have changed since the days of Rousseau. Meg Jensen has argued that the idea of autobiography as the master narrative of a sovereign self ‘has collapsed in the face of contemporary challenges to the categories of sovereignty, memory and narration’.15 As stated above, psychoanalysis, surrealism and post-​structuralism are all major components of that historical change, placing the capacity of a narrating subject to straightforwardly represent himself, his life, his memories and emotions in doubt. We might also add the whole field of literary and artistic modernism to the index of change, fundamentally altering the kinds of representations of the self that can be achieved in writing. This distinction between autofiction and modern autobiography is one of the areas to have attracted the most critical and scholarly debate since the establishment of the former as a genre apparently in its own right. Leigh Gilmore has drawn attention to the ‘limits’ of autobiographical reconstruction in order to suggest that an autobiography might tell a spiritual or metaphorical truth about its subject without necessarily being factually accurate in a verifiable way.16 The psychoanalytic writer Marie Darrieussecq has questioned the existence of a straightforward distinction between objective autobiography and subjective autofiction. According to her, the assumption that there was ever a period in history when autobiography could be written in an unproblematic, scientific and neutral way, without the encroaching and distorting effects of memory and emotional implication on the part of the subject, is at best naïve and at worst wilfully misleading. This is not merely a question of unpicking the basis on which modern autobiography is distinguished from autofiction, but also of unpicking the distinction between classical and modern forms of autobiography. In her account, there are all sorts of textual and paratextual features that cause autobiographies, ancient and modern, to resemble novels, so that any attempt to define autofiction through contradistinction to autobiography is illusory, resting on a false dichotomy. For Darrieussecq, autofiction is a first-​person form of narrative where the author appears under his own name (homo-​diegetic) and where a degree of verisimilitude to his life is maintained by reference to a series of ‘facts’ of his or her life.17 In other words, autofiction for her exists between two kinds of writing, autobiography and fiction, and since it turns out that even the autobiographical

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is partly fictive, these are indiscernible from each other even though they simultaneously contradict each other. The ‘bio’ element is reduced to a few suggestive factual details, but the ‘experiences’ narrated need not be factually true and may even be literally fantastic. Thus her approach has the effect of putting in question the position of the author in the work. This in turn is partly because her work implies that the experience of having already imagined something fantastical is itself a tangible experience. Autofiction, like the fictions of self-​retrospect discussed throughout this book, often addresses the question of writing something new after the prior experience of writing in the first place. This perhaps is a way of distinguishing metafiction from autofiction, where the former is writing about writing, and the latter is writing after writing –​that is, writing about having written. According to Grell, the departure from the strictly real and the concession to the fictive and to the fantastic mark Darrieussecq out as the most ‘radical’ user of the term autofiction.18 As we have seen, according to Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, readers of autobiography consider themselves entitled to think that there is an uncomplicated identity between author, narrator and protagonist unless the text gives them specific reason to question this identity. As Linda Anderson puts it, the author of autobiography ‘implicitly declares that he is the person he says he is and that the author and the protagonist are the same’.19 Because of this ‘assumption of good behaviour’,20 Lejeune’s readers are also entitled to assume that the events narrated are primarily, if not exclusively, factual. Like Darrieussecq, however, Jacques Lecarme has questioned both the assumption that author, narrator and protagonist can be identified with each other so straightforwardly, and the related assumption that autobiography can faithfully transcribe historical events or experiences in a wholly unmediated way. Since he thinks that to write is necessarily to mediate what is written about, Lecarme opposes Lejeune’s autobiographical pact with an autofictional pact, where those assumptions are rendered necessarily contradictory. Within the overall field of autobiography, Lejeune sees autofiction as a ‘hybrid’ form –​ part fictive, part real. To Lecarme, as to Darrieussecq, the relationship between autofiction and autobiography is dialectical, suggesting an unresolved tension between the impulse to truth understood in a factual sense, and the revelation of truths through first-​person narratives that are nevertheless fictive. Thus, Meg Jensen argues, autobiographical fictions offer ‘alternative contexts’ through which to interrogate the notion of truth itself.21 Arising from this distinction between different kinds of truth, Lecarme also distinguishes between autofiction in the strictest sense of the term and its subsequent application in a more general

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sense. The strict sense refers to a narrative of strictly real facts and events, where the fictional element is introduced through careful construction of the way of telling, so that this is again primarily a stylistic definition. In the more general sense, the lived experience is itself subject to the distortions of the imagination and the act of fictionalizing affects the content of the memories. Arising from this distinction, whereas Lejeune associated autofiction with the classical autobiographical novel, Lecarme sees autofictional writing as something new and specific to the conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty-​ first centuries. It violates le pacte autobiographique by placing in question le pacte referential –​violating, that is, the assumption that autobiography uncomplicatedly refers to a stable, factual object. Autofiction raises the possibility of a non-​ referential, non-​object orientated form of autobiographical writing. In this sense, autofiction is mainly distinguished from autobiography on a stylistic basis rather than through reference to questions of factual authenticity. Chapter 4 explored how, in the sphere of literary stylistics, Monika Fludernik has undertaken a thoroughgoing critique of the notion of fictional referentiality. She argued in The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction that fiction does not represent the world in a mimetic sense, but that the relationship between fictional portraits and the external world can better be understood through the notion of typicality, where fictional signifiers can be seen as tokens for the generic type of relationship that exists in the objective world, rather than simply and directly replicating them in full. Fludernik argues, moreover, that this shift to a non-​ mimetic form of literary representation based on the congruence of literary tokens with their generic types arose primarily in twentieth-​century fiction. In other words, Lejeune continued to see autofiction as a recent variant of classical autobiography, albeit a rebellious one. Lecarme, by contrast, was moving in another direction, emphasizing what was specific to late twentieth-​century cultural conditions and how this specificity is registered in stylistic difference. The sense of twentieth and twenty-​first century specificity that we find in Lecarme and Fludernik is one of the most positive additions that theories of autofiction make to the notion of fictions of self-​retrospect that has been developed so far in the present study. It was suggested in the Introduction that the late-​career stages of recent and contemporary writers have hardly received any critical attention at all, especially when compared to the late stages of writers of classical antiquity and/​or the renaissance. There, it was argued that the temporal concept of lateness (which is primarily an effect of age) should be supplanted by a notion of authorial retrospection (which is not dependent on age) in order to more accurately conceptualize the relationship between works produced at

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different career stages. Adding to this concept of fictional self-​retrospect a clear identification of what is particular to twentieth and twenty-​first century fictions begins to make possible a consideration of the late-​career stages of writers in that period, and therefore address the critical aporia identified at the outset of this study. This is a project to which theories of autofiction have the potential to contribute richly, precisely because they identify both twentieth-​century specificity and stylistic difference between works produced in different career stages. Lecarme’s separation of the strict and the general senses in which the term ‘autofiction’ can be applied suggests a division within the field itself into two distinct schools. Doubrovsky and his followers assume a three-​way convergence between author/​hero/​narrator to form a pact of truth with the reader. On the other hand, Philippe Gasparini proposes the terms texte strictement autobiographique and roman autobiographique (‘strict autobiography’ and ‘autobiographical novel’) to distinguish between the factual and the fictive tendencies that he believes are greater or lesser, dominant or recessive, in each case.22 According to Grell, this distinction made by Gasparini leaves unanswered the question:  how do we know what is factual in the first place?23 She identifies Arnaud Schmitt as a theorist who attempts to resolve this question by placing it in the hands of the reader. Lecarme and Gasparini both appear to concede that although autofiction in the strict sense requires the explicit homonymic relationship between author and narrator that is expected by Doubrovsky, autofiction in the more general sense might transgress this homonymic element. This non-​homonymic, non-​ referential approach is taken to a further degree in the work of Vincent Colonna. Colonna was formerly a doctoral student of Gerard Genette, which perhaps helps to explain why the field remains characterized by a scientific, structuralist impulse to categorize and classify, even though (indeed, possibly because) Lejeune’s classification of different forms of autobiographical writing was blown open by Doubrovsky in 1977. Like Darrieussecq and Gasparini, Colonna departs from the assumption that there need be strictly real events in a narrative for it to be designated ‘autofiction’. His conceptualization sees no necessary equation of autofiction with ‘confessional’ narratives. In fact, Colonna attempts a taxonomy of four different varieties of autofiction, now subdivided into autofiction fantastique, autofiction biographique, autofiction spéculaire and autofiction intrusive/​ auctoriale.24 According to Colonna’s schemata, autofiction fantastique designates a narrative where the writer invents for himself a personality and existence while, at the same time, covering up his real identity. Colonna’s main examples of these

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come from classical literary history rather than from contemporary world, and the confessional element is not operative. Autofiction biographique, by contrast, is somewhat more metafictive in the way discussed over the previous chapters. The writer is always also the hero of his story, but he fabulates his existence from a few factual givens, maintaining a certain verisimilitude between narrative and world and thereby attaching to the text a degree of truth that might be more or less subjective in each case. Colonna’s autofiction biographique thus equates to Darrieussecq’s understanding of autofiction overall. Autofiction spéculaire, or ‘mirror’ autofiction, is also metafictive in that the author takes up a reflective stance by immersing himself in the fiction, generally on the sidelines rather than at the centre of it. It is as though the narrative is a mirror in which the author sees himself obliquely reflected. Because the author is decentred in his or her own work, autofiction spéculaire is an alternative means of classifying the Bloomian ‘swerve’ identified in Lewycka’s Various Pets Alive and Dead and Ishiguro’s Unconsoled in the previous chapter. Of Colonna’s four varieties of autofiction, however, it is the fourth, autofiction intrusive/​auctoriale (‘authorial/​introspective autofiction’) that most closely accords with the idea of fictional self-​ retrospect that has been developed throughout the preceding six chapters. Overtly and explicitly, in introspective autofiction, the author’s avatar is another author (or a narrator or storyteller), even in cases where the narrative is narrated in the third person and the speaking ‘I’ of the text appears to be less in question than in the other forms. This is not least because, as Monika Fludernik argues, one of the conventions of narrative fiction is that a story is conceived of as being told unless the text clearly signals otherwise, so that the narrating ‘I’ is implied even where there is no first-​ person narrator.25 Moreover, because introspective autofiction is a form in which authors portray other authors, it addresses the key temporal challenge of how to go on writing after already having written. In returning to this challenge, it is necessary to reconnect with the field of career construction theory.

Connections between autofiction and fictions of self-​retrospect As identified over the course of the preceding chapters, one of the common assumptions made by career counsellors when they utilize the narrative method of counselling is that their clients enter counselling as a direct response to some kind of negative experience. This experience could take the form of professional

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frustration, private trauma or a variation on the two. One of the observations made in the discussion of Wayne C. Booth in Chapter 1 was that for authors who have encountered a particularly problematic career stage, the precise ‘problem’ in question may in fact be the problem of having achieved a relatively high level of success that lays down constraining expectations for their future work, which is often judged negatively if it confounds those expectations, and so limits further innovation. In the field of autofiction too, a common assumption is that writing is a reaction to what Genon calls a ‘faille fondatrice’, a founding fault line that opens up in the individual’s vista as a result of one or more destabilizing experiences.26 For instance, in the field of French writing which has hitherto been the principal domain of the autofictive, Camille Laurens’s novel Philippe (1995) was published after the death of her son. That is not to say, however, that it is about the loss of a child in any banal or merely descriptive sense. It raises complex emotional questions about how to go on writing in the wake of such a traumatic experience, and about the status of the writing produced in doing so. Laurens mobilizes a multitude of different speaking ‘I’s with the effect that even while drawing on events in her own biographical past, she also obliterates herself behind a multitude of different personae and imagines a myriad of different potential selves. Thus Grell notes that Laurens refuses to be associated with a single speaking self, asserting on the contrary that her fictional selves are many rather than singular: ‘I are’ (‘je sommes’).27 A comparable example is the writer Philippe Forest, whose first two works L’Enfant éternel (1997) and Toute la nuit (1999) were written in response to the death of his daughter. In her theoretical work Grell concurs with Genon’s view of autofiction as ‘L’écriture de la faille’ (‘writing from a fault’) and further describes it as ‘une écriture propre au manque’ (‘a form of writing suitable to loss’).28 It is unsurprising therefore that Grell refers to Doubrovsky’s Le Livre brisé (1989) as the most poignant work of autofiction in France because it raises all sorts of troubling questions about how to deal with the loss of a loved one, and more specifically, how to go on writing after such an experience.29 This emphasis on writing after a foundational experience of trauma leads her to make a distinction between two different stages in the process of composition as such: ¬¬

¬¬

¬¬

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soit on écrit depuis, on interroge la source, l’origine soit on écrit sur, en restant à distance30 writing after, interrogating the source and the origin writing on, while keeping a distance

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To the extent that it is a form of écriture depuis, or writing after, autofiction can be identified with the practice of authorial self-​retrospect that has been put forward here. It is not the same as simply writing on something from a safe distance, because it involves the committed engagement and potential transformation of the writing, exploring self. According to Grell, the practice of writing after trauma has its origins in the experiences of the Second World War, and the implicit dissolution of any easy sense of self brought about by those experiences. Indeed, Genon used the term faille fondatrice specifically in the context of his discussion of Georges-​Arthur Goldschmidt’s Un enfant aux cheveux gris (2008). This dialogue about Goldschmidt’s childhood in Nazi Germany as a protestant Jew is partly about the combination of guilt and hope that typified the period, and partly about the specifically authorial dilemma expressed by the fact that Goldschmidt’s mother tongue, the only instrument available for the realization of his artistic creation, was also the language of the Nazis. The vexed realization that his raw material as a writer, that is, the German language itself, was morally comprised forms what Genon terms his faille fondatrice. Goldschmidt’s response to this dilemma appears to have been the decision to use French as the primary language of his literary expression. If it is rooted in the experiences of war, however, Grell goes on to suggest that autofiction has subsequently become a form of writing that appears in the wake of many different kinds of crises. Jensen takes a similar view, arguing that autobiographical fictions can unsettle and disturb official accounts of traumatic historical experience in a way that enables the imagination to ‘become a vehicle to challenge the very jurisdiction of truth telling’.31 Grell identifies three other varieties of experience that seem to recur prominently in the field of autofiction. These are the split subjectivity and divided sense of selfhood that arose in postcolonial societies as a result of the colonial legacy; the death of a loved one or friend; and the long-​term experience of debilitating disease and sickness, including mental illness. Her examples of postcolonial autofictions are Nina Bouraoui, Poupée Bella (2004) and Dany Laferrière, L’énigme du retour (2009), but in English it might be more germane to think of the work of V. S. Naipaul or Salman Rushdie. Particularly prominent cases of French autofiction written following the death of a loved one are Hélène Cixous, OR (1997); Emmanuel Carrère, Un Roman russe (2007); Camille Laurens, Philippe (1995) and Annie Ernaux, L’Autre fille (2011). Tim Lott’s Scent of Dried Roses (1996) and Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013) are comparable English examples. By the same token, Grell’s main instance of an illness narrative is Hervé Guibert’s À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (1990), a serialized chronicle of Guibert’s experience of

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living with, and ultimately dying from, AIDS-​related illness. Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989) and Gwyneth Lewis’s Hospital Odyssey (2010) might be considered more germane instances in English. Guibert’s À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie starts with its author’s diagnostic experience of discovering that he has AIDS and uses that experience as the occasion for narrative experimentation into different forms of first-​person narrative, as well as the effects achieved by adopting different styles, voices and narrative techniques within the overall form. In doing so, it combines what Arnaud Genon, following Anne-​Rachel Hermetet and Jean-​Marie Paul, identifies as the  four principal characteristics of autofiction. These are the inciting experience (usually traumatic) that provokes the act of narration, an attempt to reconcile that experience with the broader narratives of history and society in which the self is situated, a stylistic innovation in the use of the speaking ‘I’ and a tactical reconstruction and public display of the subject of the portrayal.32 In other words, autofiction is a narrative practice that cannot always easily reconcile the place of the individual in a wider society whose members may or may not know the individual in question and which therefore foregrounds the attempt to do so, that is, the process of becoming situated as a literary self in and through narrative. Implicitly, therefore, there is a distinction between the ‘I’ and ‘me’ of the text, the subject who narrates and the object who is narrated. Genon refers to this distinction between ‘I’ and ‘me’ as that between the roman du je and les écritures du moi.33 He identifies it as a common, if not quite ubiquitous, feature in autofiction. This distinction between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is worth dwelling on for a moment, not least because of the career constructivist emphasis on authorship as a controlling metaphor for active engagement with a particular life problem, as opposed to passive experience of it. In both career construction and autofiction, ‘I’ as the subject of a narrative is not only more active and more questioning, but also –​ and this is the key point in autofiction –​more actively in question. The objectified ‘me’, by contrast, seems to be more passive and more settled and this is for the most part not desirable in autofiction where one of the main purposes of the genre is to use narrative as an opportunity for exploration and experimentation. Writers of autofiction are often committed to an endless and rigorous reconfiguration of the possibilities of first-​person narrative precisely so that the ‘I’ of their texts can avoid lapsing into mere ‘me’. This suggests that it is a technique whereby conventional subject-​ object relations are destabilized because the object itself is endlessly deferred in a way that ultimately calls the coherence of the speaking subject into question. This dissipation of a single speaking ‘I’ into a

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series of narrative explorations that end up leading nowhere in turn accounts for the primarily aesthetic and stylistic basis on which the genre has been defined. Works of autofiction are often characterized by a series of narrative shifts, discontinuities in the narrating self and hence also in the time frame of the narrative, where all is rendered present regardless of the chronological relationship between events in question. The transition from an object-​orientated practice of autobiography towards the actively questing subject of autofiction accelerated in the twentieth century and beyond, partly because of the modernist interrogation of the limits and distortions imposed by memory and partly because so much critical theoretical work, especially in psychoanalysis after Lacan, has called the notion of an essential self into question. The ‘I’ of a typical work of autofiction is for this reason everywhere, but everywhere in doubt. If it is possible to identify a shifting and unstable subject at the heart of a given work of autofiction, moreover, there is also a second kind of narrative discontinuity at work, that between the subjects posited by different works in cumulative relationship to each other. According to Genon, the work of Hervé Guibert can be properly understood as a form of serialization in a specifically late twentieth-​century sense of the term. À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie is not serialized in the same way as the great condition of England novels were serialized in the nineteenth century: it is not a question of readers waiting for two weeks or a month for the next edition of the newspaper or magazine to come out so that they can digest the next chapter of a single, unfolding and to at least some extent preconceived narrative. It is a different form of serial, one that reveals the interpenetration between life, lived experience and work, where the process of writing becomes one of the constitutive elements of subsequent experience and vice versa. To borrow Peter McIlveen’s expression from the field of career construction, as Guibert lived through the experiences associated with a different life chapter, these become incorporated into the different instalments that cumulatively comprised his oeuvre. By the same token it was argued in Chapter 2 that Graham Swift’s novels not only can be seen as so many discrete portrayals of different fictional vocations, but also constitute different chapters in the cumulative fulfilment of his life story as novelist. One of the main points to emerge from the discussion of McIlveen’s work in Chapter  2 was the idea that the construction of a social, dialogic communicational self requires a minimum of three distinct communicative interactions. These take place between an agent, a, and an interlocutor, b; followed by a response from b to a; and then a further response from a back to b again. At this point, if the dialogue has been truly constitutive of a new sense of self, that

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person’s behaviours, attitudes or ideas will have changed. In effect, Genon takes the life chapters approach to the careers of Guibert and Christine Angot when he says that each converts his or her life and work into a ‘serial’, where each episode is delimited by (and constitutive of) a different life stage, corresponding also to a different phase of work.34 In other words, it seems true to say that writing autofiction requires the same three-​fold interaction between authorial self and social environment that McIlveen identifies. The practice of autofiction moves from experience to writing and then on to further lived experiences. To the extent that this is the typical trajectory of a career in writing autofiction, it is somewhat complementary to the notion of retrospective fictions where three stages in interaction are again necessary, typically flowing from writing to experience and then on to further writing. Two further distinctions follow from these complementary definitions of autofiction and fictional self-​retrospect. The first is that retrospective fiction is not merely a variety of writing specific to the aftermath of trauma, but is concerned equally with writing in the presence of the already written. Tim Lott’s Scent of Dried Roses (1996) has been variously described as a memoir, autobiography or autobiographical novel, dealing with his parents’ now-​vanished way of life in a working-​class suburb of London, his mother’s suicide in her fifties and the author’s own subsequent adjustment to episodes of depression. To the extent that it follows from a faille fondatrice, it accords with the characteristics of autofiction that have been suggested here. A further characteristic of retrospective fiction, beyond the writing of trauma, is the challenge of writing again. Chapter 3 suggested that Lott’s subsequent novel, The Seymour Tapes (2005), rather than The Scent of Dried Roses, is his strictest work of fictional self-​retrospect because it posits a semi-​fictionalized author/​narrator/​participant whose ostensible reason for narrating is not the traumatic experience that he narrates, but the fact of having already narrated the prior text. In other words, fictions of self-​retrospect are not only writings that come after trauma, but writing that comes after writing (and in some cases, after writing after trauma). Autofiction in effect explores the question of what it means to go on writing after writing after trauma. To the extent that this is a recurring characteristic of the genre it too usefully adds to our understanding of retrospective fictions. Thus Camille Laurens’s Philippe (1995) is an autofictive work inspired (perhaps a better word is provoked, or elicited) by the death of her son. Romance nerveuse (2010) re-​engages with this foundational experience of trauma and with the fault line it opens up in the author’s sense of self. But it also engages with something different, the question not only of how to live after such an experience, but also

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the question of how to go on writing after having already written about it. When autofiction commits to the perpetual re-​engagement and reinterrogation of the authorial self as such, the result is a work of fictional self-​retrospect. The convergence of the autofictive (writing after trauma) with the retrospective (writing after writing) is discernible in the career of a writer such as Christine Angot, whose Rendez-​vous (2006) has many of the same themes as her earlier works, but expressed with stylistic innovation and experimentation. Autofiction is not an end in itself, but an ongoing and open process that creates a framework for rereading the subjectivity of the experiencing subject while simultaneously meditating on the difficulty involved in crossing generic, sociocultural and linguistic barriers. It is because crossing these barriers is impossible that Angot’s autofiction constitutes an ironic abandonment of the author as such. It is a place where she looks for herself but finds only the self as other. A final French example of autofiction as writing after writing is Georges-​ Arthur Goldschmidt’s L’ésprit de retour (2011). In it, Goldschmidt writes about his symbolic ‘homecoming’ to the land of his childhood, which was also the land of the Nazis, giving rise to the survivor’s guilt that forms the basis of his creative dilemma, his faille fondatrice. In the process he brings his writing back to the same theme of his first work Un Corps dérisoire (1971) of forty years earlier to write about it again, in a different way. In other words, it is not just writing after trauma, but writing after writing after trauma. This last example should not be taken to suggest, however, that fictions of self-​retrospect are associated with the experience of ageing as such. On the contrary, arising out of the distinction between writing after trauma and writing after writing, the second key distinction to make is that fictional self-​retrospect is not merely an effect of authorial biological age, as would otherwise be implied by an uninterrogated notion of lateness and its implication in the construction of the late stage of a given career. Lateness as an effect of age appears to be defined by its chronological positioning within a particular life and/​or career stage. However, the question How old is late? has never been answered in any but the vaguest terms and indeed this is one reason why lateness alone is an unsatisfactory concept for dealing with the complexities of different career stages. In contrast to the late, the retrospective as a temporal-​relational concept is constituted by its dialogic convergence with what comes before. As such it is not defined by biological age and in fact the question of age does not arise. As the examples of athletes and artists suggested by Peter Laslett in Chapter  1 imply, individuals could enter the retrospective stage at any age from their twenties to their eighties, and this is what distinguishes the retrospective from the merely late, which

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has typically –​though vaguely –​been associated with old age. The need to effect a transition from a biologically overdetermined sense of lateness to a critically reflexive concept of the retrospective has been the primary argument of this book. It is exemplified by Arnaud Genon, who says that Doubrovsky’s last work, Un homme de passage (2011), is not the kind of book one writes in the twilight of one’s life, even though Doubrovsky is approaching the twilight of his.35 The notion of autofiction presupposes an interest in the author as such but, at the same time, endlessly defers the fruition of pursuing that interest. That is, beyond mere biographic reconstruction, and certainly beyond sensationalism or tittle-​tattle, both the practice and the critical interpretation of autofiction consider what it means to be a writer. The many different definitions of the concept that have evolved each in some way contribute to this re-​establishment of the subject of the writer as a legitimate area of inquiry in literary practice and critical research. Indeed, Genon argues that it is because the concept is so complex that it makes us think again about our concepts of literature and authors.36 Lott and Barnes can be seen as examples of English writers of autofiction on the grounds that they write and rewrite themselves after trauma, and Graham Swift is a writer whose composite oeuvre constitutes the gradual serialization of the authorial vocation. Eefje Claassen has suggested that the subjectivity of the subject, that is, the active questing and questioning of the author as subject, has always been a particularly prominent concern among feminist and postcolonial writers.37 Two of the other writers discussed in these pages, A. S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie, can be seen as autofictive writers on the same grounds. They too write in the aftermath of turbulent personal or historical experience and they too evince a sense of having serialized their lives and work in so many different instalments. In these cases the cultural and political context derived from their status as feminist and postcolonial writers has a third effect, that of the semi-​fictionalization of the authorial self. It was argued in Chapter  5 that the most experimental aspect of Byatt’s Frederica Potter quartet of novels, beyond any stylistic feature or technical innovation, was their temporal relationship to Byatt’s life. Twenty-​four years elapsed between the first and the fourth novel in the series, creating a sense of the serialization outlined above. It appears that in Frederica, a female intellectual in a man’s world, Byatt created a suitable name for a character whose life experiences seem very like her own. In other words, the novels could only be written with these lengthy temporal gaps because these were the spaces in which the author lived. As we have seen, the process of writing autoficton requires the constant interplay between lived experience and writing, while the practice of fictional

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retrospect requires a more specific interplay between writing, experience and further writing. The experiences associated with each stage of Frederica’s life are imaginatively and symbolically (as opposed to strictly factually) congruent with the different stages of Byatt’s own. Furthermore, in the Cambridge student Anna Severell of The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in the female author Cassandra of The Game (1967) and in the poetry scholar Maud Bailey of Possession (1990) Byatt had created a whole series of other women writers and intellectuals who at various times contended with the same challenges and obstacles as her. When we look at this recurring semi-​fictionalization of the author and her distillation of her authorial self across the whole range of her work, we can say that all of them are fictional versions of Byatt but none of them are her. Perhaps the most original thing about Salman Rushdie’s most recent novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights (2015) is that although the action is set in the present, it is narrated from a standpoint of another thousand years in the future, in a time when all religion has ceased to exist and with it has vanished religious fundamentalism, intolerance and violence. The central conflict of the novel is between two medieval Spanish philosophers, one of whom, Ghazali, is a devout Islamic theologian while the other, Ibn Rushd, is a rationalist and an unbeliever. In Rushdie’s familiar magical realist form, Ghazali is resuscitated in the twenty-​first century and calls down a dark jinn from the fairy land of Peristan to inflict such fear and terror on humanity that the world’s population will be driven back into the fold of religious belief. Their actions are counterbalanced by the light fairy princess, Dunia, who works with Ibn Rushd to defeat the jinn and defend a rationalist, secular society. Moreover, the novel also contains a number of fictional avatars for Rushdie (the author), where the avatars are themselves other authors. Geronimo and Alexandra, the human survivors of the war between the dark jinn and the fairy princess write a book, In Coherence, that is not so much a founding text of a religion, but the opposite: the founding text of a post-​religious philosophy purporting to be based on rationalist thought and humanist notions of equality. This book is the means by which the (future) narrator says his generation came to know about the events narrated a thousand years before. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights is partly about the writing of another book, which in turn is about the metaphorical authoring of a newly secular society. The idea of a post-​fundamentalist society is one in which Rushdie has been strongly invested throughout his career, especially since the fatwa imposed on him following publication of The Satanic Verses (1988). Immediately before Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights, he had

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written a more straightforwardly autobiographical account of the effects of the fatwa on his life and relationships, Josef Anton: A Memoir (2012). In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights, by contrast, he writes about approximately the same theme but in a much looser, freer and imaginative way not dependent on the accuracy of facts, dates or occasions. Thus he gives to the rationalist anti-​totalitarian character a name, Ibn Rushd, that is all but his own, and places that semi-​fictionalized version of himself in solidarity with a wider secular composite ‘we’ through whose collective voices the novel is narrated. If Josef Anton is an autobiographical work, then Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights can properly be considered autofictive.

Provisional observations This somewhat experimental chapter has started to explore the congruence between French theories of autofiction and the fictional practice of a number of contemporary anglophone authors. The work discussed is both retrospective in the way defined throughout the preceding chapters and at least somewhat autobiographical in nature. Using the critical vocabulary and analytical tools of career construction theory has made it possible precisely to identify and evaluate the nodes of intersection at which theories of autofiction align with those of fictional self-​retrospect, and some important parameters and boundaries that exist between them. Overall, the chapter has identified four specific elements of comparison. First, autofiction is often triggered by a foundational experience of trauma or loss that opens up a fault line in the outlook of the author and so provokes a distinctive kind of fictional creation. In career construction theory too, from Savickas’s disequilibrium to Maree’s crossroads and Cochran’s decision situation, it is common to associate negative experience with the desire for change and the turn to counselling. Within the field, however, there is considerable critical discussion over the nature and content of what constitutes a negative experience at the outset: what defines a ‘problem’ as such? It has been suggested over the previous chapters that for writers at a retrospective stage of their careers, the problem is not necessarily one of having experienced critical and commercial failure, but, on the contrary, one of having become so well recognized for a particular aesthetic style that further innovation becomes unwelcome and writers who attempt it are prone to be judged critically by the standards of their own earlier work. In other words, there is a foundational fault at the heart of both autofiction and fictional self-​retrospect, but the former is primarily concerned

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with writing after trauma, whereas the latter is more concerned with writing after writing as such. This means that works of autofiction can be understood using the tools of career construction theory in cases where they too foreground the question of what it means to write not only after trauma, but also what it means to go on writing after having already done so. Second, theories of autofiction identify a discontinuity of the narrating ‘I’ within and between the discrete texts that cumulatively comprise an oeuvre. The V. S. Naipaul who was the author of A House for Mr Biswas does not feel like the same author as the Naipaul who wrote Magic Seeds, even if he is the same human being. Such shifts in the perspective of the narrating authorial ‘I’ across life stages is one of the central preoccupations of a theory of fictions of self-​ retrospect, which identifies the temporal paradox of an author’s non self-​identity over time as one of the defining characteristics of the retrospective. Related to that, autofiction is thirdly a practice that is committed to the serialization of a number of different life stages, or what in career construction theory would be referred to as life chapters. As we have seen, autofiction differs from retrospective fiction in the explicit definition of trauma and its relation to the act of artistic creation. In both cases, lived experience is clearly important, but it was suggested that autofiction is a practice that moves from experience to writing and then on to further experience, whereas a truly retrospective fictional mode moves from writing to experience and then on to further writing. In other words, fictions of self-​retrospect consider the status of having written as itself a constitutive experience rather than something easily separated from the category of experience otherwise defined. Finally, the fourth element of autofiction that contributes to an understanding of retrospective fictional practice is the semi-​fictionalization of the authorial self. Salman Rushdie both is and is not the narrator of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights. The different female writer-​protagonists created in A. S. Byatt’s fiction both are and are not A. S. Byatt herself. By placing fictional avatars who are themselves other authors in a number of fictive scenarios that nevertheless speak to and reveal the central life themes of the empirical author outside the text, the semi-​fictionalization of the author enables a series of narrative experiments. It explores the question of whether the authorial ‘I’ is singular and inherently stable regardless of context, or whether, when the scenario alters, the attributes of the author alter too. That is, it is a practice that explores what Savickas refers to in career construction theory as the poetics of personhood. The semi-​fictionalization of the authorial self contributes to a constant imaginative renewal of that self across different life chapters. In doing so, it expands the

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experiential repertoire of the author as author, where the category of experience again incorporates the experience of the already written. At the same time as it adds these four dimensions to our understanding of the newly emerging concept of fictional self-​retrospect, the field of autofiction is also to some extent enlarged and reinvigorated by it. This is partly through an introductory survey in the English language of French theories of autofiction, on which there is considerable potential for future research to expand. Likewise, it is also enabled through the innovative consideration of English-​language authors such as Rushdie, Byatt, Swift, Lott and Barnes as themselves autofictive writers in their various ways. Again, this consideration carries with it the possibility of further critical scholarship into the autofictive nature of their work and that of other anglophone writers and artists. By demonstrating that many of the key components of career construction theory are also analytic elements in theoretical discussions of autofiction, the chapter has provisionally identified an illuminating, innovative and fruitful convergence between the two fields on which it is hoped that deeper and more sustained theoretical inquiries might expand.

Notes 1 Arnaud Genon, Autofiction: Pratiques et Théories (Paris: Mon Petit Éditeur, 2013), p. 51. 2 Isabelle Grell, L’Autofiction (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), p. 66. 3 Karen Ferreira-​Meyers, ‘From Minor Genre to Major Genre: Crime Fiction and Autofiction’, in Major versus Minor? –​Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World, ed. Theo D’Haen, Iannis Goerlandt and Roger D. Sell (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015) p. 173. 4 Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Contract’, in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 193. 5 Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 8. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Genon, Autofiction, p. 205. 8 Quoted in Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 16. 9 Ibid., p. 12. 10 Ibid., p. 11. 11 Cited in Genon, Autofiction, p. 171. 12 Bran Nicol, ‘“The Memoir as Self-​Destruction”: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, in Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 104.

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13 Quoted in Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 15. 14 Genon, Autofiction, p. 191. 15 Meg Jensen, ‘Post-​Traumatic Memory Projects: Autobiographical Fiction and Counter-​monuments’, Textual Practice, 28 (4), 2014, p. 713. 16 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 36. 17 Quoted in Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 19. 18 Ibid. 19 Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 3. 20 See Claassen, Author Representations in Literary Reading, p. 115. 21 Jensen, ‘Post-​Traumatic Memory Projects’, p. 704. 22 Philippe Gasparini, Est-​il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 311. 23 Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 25. 24 Vincent Colonna, Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires (Auch, France: Tristram, 2004), p. 34, p. 93, p. 119, p. 135. 25 Fludernik, Fictions, p. 65. 26 Genon, Autofiction, p. 58. 27 Quoted in Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 41. 28 Ibid., pp. 69, 80. 29 Ibid., p. 76. 30 Ibid., p. 54. 31 Jensen, ‘Post-​Traumatic Memory Projects’, p. 708. 32 Genon, Autofiction, pp. 162–​67. 33 Ibid., p. 167. 34 Ibid., p. 25. 35 Ibid., p. 25. 36 ‘Complexe donc, il nous (re)donne à penser la literature et celui que le stucturalisme avait laissée pour mort: l’auteur.’ Genon, Autofiction, p. 169. 37 Claassen, Author Representations in Literary Reading, p. 20.

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Conclusion: Advancing the Occupational Plot

‘How late is late?’ I was asked when I discussed fictions of self-​retrospect at a conference, by a delegate who had apparently missed the point. Although I have focused my attention away from the individual works for which the authors I consider are best known and onto a series of works subsequent to them, this is not necessarily a matter of looking at works produced during old age. On the contrary, I have sought to decouple the association of lateness with accumulated age that has previously dominated discussions of late works. In engaging with such works explicitly in a sustained, detailed and newly comparative way, I have suggested that regardless of biological age, the retrospective stage of an authorial career is one that occurs after a prior period of success that remains stylistically distinct from it. For this reason, I have argued that career construction theory provides a useful way of conceptualizing the different stages in an authorial career because it tells us that each individual must generate the different stages for himself or herself. For this reason, the kind of literary practice that occurs during the retrospective stage is self-​conscious and self-​critical. That is to say, from a theoretical perspective fictional self-​retrospect can be seen as a specific kind of metafiction in which the author revisits his earlier forms, themes and idioms to use them again as if for the first time. Conceptualizing later works as metafictive in this way brings the definition of fictions of self-​retrospect into a close rapprochement with the French theoretical field of autofiction, although with a number of important distinctions. One of the original stimuli for this project was the realization of how frequently the retrospective works are overlooked or neglected, to say nothing of the instances where their critical reception is actively negative, even hostile. Thus, for example, a ‘contemporary’ writer such as V. S. Naipaul is more likely to be introduced as the author of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which is still read more widely and more positively appraised, than of Magic Seeds (2004). Salman

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Rushdie’s work figures prominently in critical discussion of postcolonial writing, but his work after Fury (2001) tends to receive less attention than Midnight’s Children (1981) or The Satanic Verses.1 This critical habit of undervaluing the later work in the face of the earlier has become an unexamined cultural reflex. It has the peculiar effect that even contemporary writers remain narrowly associated with work that was written decades in the past, creating both a temporal and an imaginative barrier to a more positive critical reception for their more recent work. It might be the case that this problem is especially true of so-​called postcolonial writers such as Naipaul and Rushdie. Two generations after the independence moments of the mid-​twentieth century, the period in which it is meaningful to talk about ‘postcolonial’ history is drawing to an end. For ‘postcolonial’ writers after the postcolonial there is no emergent category to which their subsequent work can easily be assimilated. Since critical practice often follows the path of least resistance, this absence of simple categorization appears to render difficult a positive critical valuation of that work. It is certain that the imbrication of postcolonial history with a metafictive textual practice is one of the areas where fictions of self-​retrospect can most usefully be brought into conjunction with the domain of autofiction. On the other hand, the critical dismissal of the later works is by no means specific to postcolonial authors and is in fact very general. Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) is critically lauded and Last Orders (1995) is a prize winner. Wish You Were Here (2011), by contrast, is undervalued. Tim Lott’s Scent of Dried Roses (1996) is a critical success; The Seymour Tapes (2005) goes relatively unnoticed. What I have tried to do, in effect, is investigate if it really is the case that the retrospective works genuinely are inferior to those that precede them; or whether this position has been arrived at indirectly through a combination of critical inertia and unexamined habit. This investigation has been possible by asking a series of theoretical questions that were laid down in the Introduction. First of all, I  started with the question:  what is the relationship between an author’s earlier work and later output? Although of course no two careers are the same, and there is no simple blueprint for what a modern literary career typically looks like, the tendency discussed above to overlook or actively dismiss works produced some time after a putatively defined ‘high point’ has not only become very general, but is often expressed in a recurring critical vocabulary. Where the matter under discussion is a sin of omission, that is, where the later works have simply been ignored or unnoticed, that habit of equating the author with the earlier work has often carried on unchecked, in a way that does not allow for

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the renewal or reinvigoration of the writer’s authorial self. But for the author as author, the rewriting of the self is often one of the explicit aims of writing as such, so that fictions of self-​retrospect can be defined not merely as writing about writing, but writing about rewriting. It is a practice that gives rise to the second-​ order metafiction, or meta metafiction, postulated in the case of Ian McEwan in Chapter 4. Moreover, in cases where the works in question have been actively and explicitly rejected, this has tended to be expressed in a decline narrative through reference to the earlier or mature work, compared to which the individual piece under consideration is taken to be inferior. The reviews of Swift’s Wish You Were Here examined in Chapter 2 made exactly this kind of reference to Waterland and Last Orders. Where is the suspense of the earlier work? Where is the narrative mastery? Where are the language and the fluency and the style? Such critical-​ rhetorical appeals for a recuperation of what was best in the prior work inevitably end up judging what comes later negatively for failing to deliver it. This discovery led on to the second and third questions, which were whether or not it is appropriate to judge work produced in different career stages by the same criteria; and whether it is possible to take into account the existence of the earlier work when judging the quality of the later, without making the critical comparative judgement expressed above. It was primarily to address these two questions that I  have found it useful to bring the field of career construction theory from its place in social psychology into the domain of author research. Career construction theory draws on metaphors of authorship when career counsellors posit their clients as potential authors of their own career stories. This is its basic narrative method. Beyond that, though, it also becomes a new theory of authorship when it is applied to the cases of individuals whose careers are not just metaphorically but also literally those of authors. As such, it supplies a conceptual paradigm for identifying the different stages that compose an overall career, and an appropriate critical vocabulary for the discussion of each. Using that paradigm, and the vocabulary of different life chapters, makes it possible to talk about what works produced during each career stage have in common with each other, and how these are meaningfully and creatively different from the works produced during other periods of that same career. In turn, this makes it possible to analyse a career according to two differently reckoned time frames, one at the macro level and the other at the micro level, so that its structure is both that of a linear, sequential chronology and a circular field that continues to return to its own beginning in order to start again. The advantage of considering an author’s career according to these two time frames simultaneously is that doing so generates a provisional solution to the

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central problem of late-​career authorship. It makes it possible to reconcile two or more different self-​images of the same author and hence address the problem of a given author’s non self-​identity in different works over time. In each of the retrospective works that have been discussed in the preceding chapters, what emerges in effect is a continuum of different subject positions occupied by the same author at various moments. The Salman Rushdie who wrote The Satanic Verses is the same person who wrote Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-​Eight Nights, but in a meaningful sense is not quite the same author because he writes the latter from a different subject position. This new position includes the experience of having written The Satanic Verses. In other words, there is a dialogical relationship in the writing of the latter work that is by definition not possible in the writing of the earlier. Implicitly, when works produced from a later career stage are considered, interpreting them according to criteria laid down exclusively by the aesthetic features of the author’s ‘high’ period will frequently result in them being judged merely weak imitations of them. By contrast, judging the later works according to a different set of questions would liberate them from that shadow of expectation and bring us to a different estimation of their aesthetic and stylistic properties. This means it is possible to take into account the existence of the earlier work when considering the achievements of the later in a dialectical way, measuring not so much conformity but deviation and innovation within an existing format. In other words, precisely because the works from the ‘high’ point have already been achieved, the later works are necessarily different in kind. It scores no points against author or text to mine them for evidence of creative decline. On the contrary, although fictions of self-​retrospect are temporally belated in the sense that they are written after a critical or commercial zenith has been reached, this new way of defining lateness relationally means that the retrospective stage is not dependent on age and so questions of decline in creative mastery become less relevant. Reading fictions of self-​retrospect for their distinctive features, rather than as indicators of a dwindling artistic vision, would then have to draw on an alternative basis. To define that basis brings up the fourth question that was posed in the Introduction: how is it possible to alter the criteria by which we make critical judgements specific to work produced during the later stages of a career and so avoid judging it as a merely inferior version of what came before? When I started to develop an argument in favour of understanding the specificity of late-​career works, I was accused of mangling critical judgements by insisting on creating specific criteria for different works rather than taking an objective view of the

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merits of each work. But after all, one of the major advances in literary scholarship of the last twenty or thirty years has been to emphasize that reading does not take place in a vacuum and the forming of critical judgements is not autonomous from other discourses. On the contrary, they are informed by all sorts of other practices, processes and forms of knowledge so that no work, and no judgement of a piece of work, can really be thought of as standing on its own. It might be that the ideal reader of a late-​career novel is one who has no knowledge of the earlier work of its author and would then also have none of the critical prejudices discussed above. But we know from the field of reader research that there are no ideal readers and that the act of reading never takes place in this kind of isolation. Moreover, it has been argued here that audience research can also be extended so that the figurative ‘audience’ includes the self-​projection of the author. The current critical environment is very different from that in which the concept of the intentional fallacy arose in American New Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s and an advantage of applying career construction theory to authorship research is that it decisively restores the notion of intentionality. This is not in most cases a question of interviewing authors to identify and define precise aesthetic intentions, but a question of how a given author handles existing literary and generic conventions, which are socially generated. In other words, the sociological definition of intentionality is mainly a question of what the author expects the audience to expect. But audience expectation cannot avoid being constituted in part by the audience’s knowledge of the author’s existing work. This is why the judgements we make of late-​career works need to take into account this fact of dwelling in the shadow of the already written. Hence the criteria by which we judge such works are implicitly different from those by which we judge the earlier output, which is not being measured against the contents of an already established prior oeuvre in the same way. The figure of the author has squarely returned as an important aspect of literary research in a way that makes it impossible to conceive of reading as entirely divorced from knowledge of the social world. Given that this is the case, it would be very odd if we continued to judge works through appeal to a dubious set of objective merits and failed to construct an appropriate critical vocabulary for addressing the presence of the author in his or her career. Career construction theory tells us that what constitutes success for someone in one phase of their career is likely to be quite different from what constitutes success for the same person in a different phase. That is, the criteria are contingent, partial and variable rather than objectively neutral in any externally verifiable way. Accordingly,

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bringing career construction approaches into the domain of author research has the effect of emphasizing the need to make different kinds of critical judgements by invoking different and always provisional criteria for work produced during radically different career stages. My focus on the contingent nature of the criteria of judgement posed one final question at the start of this study, which was: if the criteria for evaluating late works were altered, how would our understanding of the work in question also change? In the Introduction, I drew attention to Haruki Murakami’s metaphorical comparison between marathon running and writing. Indeed, I  suggested that in Murakami’s case the comparison is not just metaphorical but also physical and mechanical since he became a runner and a writer at the same time and for him the two are causally related. The key idea to emerge from his What I Talk about When I Talk about Running is that he continues to run marathons in his sixties, despite knowing that it is very unlikely that he will ever again break his fastest time. This does not mean that he does not run his hardest each time. Rather, it suggests that how he considers the achievement of each run in a qualitative sense changes over the course of his career as a runner. In some senses, Murakami’s variable definition of what constitutes a successful marathon is emblematic of what I have said about fictions of self-​retrospect. Murakami associates a gradual falling off in his physical performance with the effects of ageing and the fact of having passed his peak physical condition. Nevertheless, his emphasis on continuing to do the best that he can –​where best is a revised and reflexive construct as opposed to an objective measure –​goes some way to overhauling the idea of a physical peak followed by a qualitative decline. The category of fictions of self-​retrospect goes even further by taking the notion of age out of the equation and positing instead the idea of a dialogue between work produced during different career stages. How each work speaks to the others is necessarily different, and understanding that difference replaces the idea of a qualitative decline with a notion of what is particular to each. In effect, Chapter 6 argued that this dialogue between works, with a changing sense of what is achieved by each, can be discerned taking place across the trajectory of A. S. Byatt’s career as a whole. That is, Byatt’s Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967) would be considered relatively minor novels today were it not for the fact that Possession (1990) became one of the most lauded examples of British postmodern writing and launched Byatt’s career into a much higher orbit. Retrospectively, this had the effect of leading to an upturn of critical interest in those earlier works. I suggested in Chapter 7 that because they address Byatt’s central question of what it means to become a female writer, in an

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imaginative as opposed to a strictly factual way, they can appropriately be seen as examples of autofiction in English. The retrospective increase in critical interest in Byatt’s work parallels her own retrospective fictional practice. As a clear instantiation of this high level of self-​ retrospect, I discussed her early novels in Chapters 6 and 7, after discussing her more recent novel The Children’s Book (2009) in Chapter 4. There, I argued that in its portrayal of a protagonist who is also a storyteller, The Children’s Book engaged in the autofictive practice that is typical of fictions of self-​retrospect, and that it returned to the practice of metafiction that characterizes much of Byatt’s work, from The Game to Possession (1990). Rather than being judged as weak imitation or derivation of Possession, however, The Children’s Book received relative critical success and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel marked a renewal of Byatt’s authorial self, and her capacity to return to some of the themes and techniques for which she had already become known. However, those things did not form a critical barrier to the positive reception of it. In other words, The Children’s Book is an example of how fictions of self-​retrospect, if considered in the way outlined above, need not always be judged inferior versions of their authors’ ‘main’ achievements and can be judged according to separate criteria particular to them. The same is true to some extent of Kingsley Amis’s late novel The Old Devils (1986). These remarks are not so much comments on the innate properties of fictions of self-​retrospect as an attempt to reach for a way of reading late-​career fictions that extends beyond the current orthodoxy.

Extending the occupational plot This seems to be a useful moment at which to review the theoretical concepts and substantial ideas that have been developed over the course of the foregoing chapters. In sketching out the basis for supplanting the notion of lateness with that of the retrospective, the Introduction laid out in detail the four key components of career construction as it is practised by current career counsellors such as Mark Savickas, Larry Cochran and Kobus Maree. Those components are the shift from a mainly quantitative-​based approach for modelling careers to one that employs a narrative method; the cultivation of people’s capacity for meta-​reflection in order to scrutinize critically the qualitative worth of their career aspirations and hence set both their own goals and their own criteria for establishing whether or not those goals have been achieved; the association of different micro-​narratives expressing those goals with different career stages

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(or life chapters) and finally the search for continuity across apparently diverse career phases through identifying one or more life themes (‘macro-​narratives’). Implicit in each of these elements is the recognition that in the changed employment conditions of the early twenty-​first century, people are likely to be involved in several different kinds of careers during the course of their working lives. Related to that is the realization that different career stages can start and end at different times for different people in often surprising ways. The stages might overlap and seep into each other. They might be open-​ended and ongoing or they might exist concurrently with each other. All of this suggests that career trajectories cannot be mapped out according to a transferable model and have instead to be generated for each person individually through narrative. This is why career construction theory is a particularly appropriate lens through which to examine authorial careers, where new career stages are often difficult to discern from the outside and are perhaps only identifiable through detailed examination and analysis of the kinds of narratives produced. In other words, far from following a generalizable or predetermined number of stages, authorial careers only enter new stages when they begin producing new kinds of narratives that are particular to themselves. Career construction theory provides a rich means of identifying such particularity. Or as Savickas puts it: [p]‌ractitioners must understand the meaning presented in clients’ stories, relate this meaning to the initial reason they sought counselling, and prepare to retell clients’ stories in a manner that draws a sharp character sketch, highlights the career theme, and envisions scenarios that extend the occupational plot.2

Through its emphasis on the co-​construction of new life and/​or career stories career construction both informs and is informed by recent critical and theoretical developments in the field of authorship research, which have increasingly decoupled images of authorship from the inherited idea of the fully autonomous creative individual and emphasize instead the social and therefore collaborative processes involved in any kind of creative undertaking. This was the argument expounded in Chapter 2, where Peter McIlveen and Wendy Patton’s notions of life theme and the dialogic self were combined with Peter Rabinowitz’s concept of the authorial audience to suggest that the author’s thinking about the audience considers how an audience might react to his work, and responds to that reaction in advance of it. That is, it is inherently dialogic. When applied to the career of Graham Swift, this discovery then had the effect of making it possible to begin exploring how, once certain expectations for an author’s work are established among the audience, they become established also as a social convention which

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the author himself must address in his next work. But the caveat was raised that works that confound existing expectation are likely to be judged negatively for doing so, often in terms that explicitly invoke the perceived higher qualities of the prior works from which the deviation has occurred. This is one reason why fictions of self-​retrospect are often deeply self-​questioning, as their authors seek possible means of returning to familiar themes without lapsing into mere repetition. Chapter 3 drew on Sara Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s method of social science portraiture and Mark Savickas’s practice of constructing life portraits to identify the different kinds of portraits that can be produced in narrative. It argued that though working in a context very different from Rabinowitz, Lawrence-​ Lightfoot also takes the view that a portrait creates a context for creative dialogue between artist and audience or, as she puts it, between portraitist and perceiver. Thus she and Davis compare an artist’s career to a game of chess, in which the portraitist and the observer are the two different players, each anticipating not only the other’s next move, but also the one after that. It is a metaphor that, like Rabinowitz’s authorial audience, includes the potential calculation by the artist of what the audience expects of her. The process of compiling a portrait is one that draws on the full range of resources made available by the individual artist’s experiential repertoire. At the same time, the practice of portraiture requires a profound critical self-​awareness on the part of both the portraitist and the subject of the portrait to their potential mutual transformation. It was argued that when this transformation occurs, the social sciences researcher takes on the behaviours and professional attributes of an author, whereas the empirical author assumes the somewhat different behaviours and attributes of a storyteller. In self-​retrospective fictional practice, the different kinds of objects that can be created are the self-​portrait of the other (as was the case with Tim Lott’s Seymour Tapes), the self-​portrait as the other (Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened of) and the self-​portrait by the other (Endō’s Scandal). In the last instance, Rabinowitz’s authorial audience and Lawrence-​Lightfoot’s encounter between portraitist and perceiver are both ways of conceptualizing the recreation and renewal of the authorial self by positing a potential other in dialogue with whom it is possible to conceive of the practice of authorship taking place. Chapter 4 advanced the slightly different notion of an extended dialogue between the author and other incarnations of his authorial self over time. There, Kobus Maree’s career constructivist idea of triangulation was brought to bear on the field of authorship research by bringing it into contact with Gerard Genette’s category of ‘intimate paratexts’. In career construction, triangulation is

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a practice of testing out one or more potential subject positions by generating career narratives in which the subject may or may not recognize himself as a viable protagonist. In other words, triangulation is not so much about verifying empirical data for its factual veracity as it is about composing life portraits in and through which the subject is empowered to come to gradually greater degrees of self-​awareness and self-​knowledge, the better to be able to apply that knowledge in the fulfilment of new vocational aspirations during changing career stages. In effect, the chapter argued, this is what authors manage when they create new career stages for themselves dialogically. The ‘intimate paratext’ is then a category of paratext in which authors address their own earlier work in this more or less explicit way. In Genette’s account, this is most likely to happen in the case of a later preface written to herald publication of a new edition of a much earlier work, as was the case with the later preface (1991) to Byatt’s Shadow of the Sun (1964). In addition, it was also argued that any earlier work itself effectively prefaces what comes later because the author’s experiential repertoire now includes the experience of having written it. In this sense, The Shadow of the Sun is not only prefaced by the new introduction written to accompany a later edition; it also prefaces Byatt’s subsequent novels. This prefatorial act was observable in different ways in the relationship between V. S. Naipaul’s House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Magic Seeds (2004); and between Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012). Chapter 5 moved in a slightly different direction again. Beginning with an examination of Larry Cochran’s insight into the dynamics of decision-​making in the area of career construction, it came to the conclusion that what Cochran calls a decision ‘proper’ is rarely made in a conscious, voluntary fashion and is often an involuntary process. In other words, people are as often taken by their decisions as the other way around. Since a decision arises gradually, it cannot be reduced to a single moment in time and hence cannot be defined temporally. This is precisely what has been argued of career stages throughout these pages: that it is theoretically weak to conceptualize them as mere chunks of time, and that they should instead be seen as collections of relationships to which meaning is ascribed. In the second half of Chapter  5, Cochran’s approach to decision-​making was combined with Pierre Bayard’s taxonomy of different ways of ‘not reading’. Bayard’s collective library was used to refer to the sum total of all existing books that, because they exist before we begin reading, defines the parameters in which the act of reading occurs. But since in Bayard’s account reading also turned out to be a prelude to writing, the reader was redefined as a new kind of writer, who

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had to decide how far to replicate existing models laid down in the collective library and how far to try and transform them by ‘unreading’ them. In the case of Salman Rushdie’s career this was a matter of moving from a geopolitical location in Midnight’s Children (1981) that was ironically concrete given its magical realist nature, to one that was much looser and more abstract in Fury (2001). In Byatt’s case it was a question of superseding a number of autofictional works in her early career with a series of lengthy digressions into other written forms within a fictional work. Thus A Whistling Woman (2002) encompassed mathematical equations, Christian ethics, Kierkegaardian philosophy, psychological theory and critical lectures that all placed different kinds of demands on Byatt’s readers when compared with The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Virgin in the Garden (1978), where she had placed fictional demands on herself. Implicit in the contrast between the concepts of the collective library and the process of unreading was the realization that prior literary works cast a long and potentially constraining shadow over what comes after them. This assumption was interrogated in Chapter 6, which argued that Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) is characterized by a paradoxical timeliness. On the one hand, it was committed to a high art aesthetic and narrow version of the literary canon that was being increasingly overhauled throughout the 1970s and 1980s and so was out of joint with the main currents in literary research at the time. On the other hand, though, Bloom was also somewhat interested in the idea of a literary career as such, which was an area of literary research that was still in its early stages at that time. As a result he was somewhat aligned to such innovative studies of the period as Said’s Beginnings (1975) and Booth’s Company We Keep (1988). In the last instance, the chapter concluded that The Anxiety of Influence can be used to illuminate the stages of an authorial career if Bloom’s six different revisionary ratios for identifying the relationship between a contemporary writer and his forebears are supplemented with a seventh ratio, that of self-​retrospect. Finally, Chapter  7 explored potential areas of congruence between fictions of self-​retrospect and the field of autofiction that originated in France in the 1970s and has more recently been gaining momentum in English-​language discussion. Though definitions of autofiction vary and are in fact highly contested, the chapter argued that Said and Booth’s notion of a literary career as a specific creation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of the useful points of connection between fictions of self-​retrospect and autofiction. Like the fictions of self-​retrospect discussed over the preceding chapters, autofiction creates a series of discontinuities between its narrating ‘I’, both within individual works and across a cumulative series of different works. In other words, writers

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of autofiction are committed to the serialization of different life periods, and these can be considered analogous to the career stages that have been discussed throughout these chapters. On the other hand, one of the important differences between autofiction and fictional self-​retrospect is that autofiction often considers what it means to write after the experience of trauma, whereas a truly retrospective practice considers what it means to go on writing after already having written. That is, it expands the category of the experiential repertoire of the writer to include the experience of the already written. The chapter concluded that if autofiction is partly characterized as writing after trauma, self-​retrospect is more akin to writing after writing.

Limitations and potential extensions This study has analysed the retrospective works of contemporary British authors of prose fiction. It has used the concept of the retrospective in the dynamic relational sense that was defined in the Introduction and intended to replace the vague and biologically overdetermined concept of late. Before finishing, I would also like to consider how this approach might be used and applied to critical practice in other fields in the future. First of all, I  have not considered incomplete or unfinished works. This is because although such works often by definition are created at the end of a given career, the very fact of being incomplete renders impossible the processes of final editing and preparation for publication on which the stylistic and idiomatic developments that have dominated the foregoing discussion strongly depend. On the other hand, Roger Grenier has argued that an author’s work is inherently unfinished, so that in his account, being incomplete is no logical a priori reason for not discussing any particular unfinished work.3 Doing so, in other words, might potentially expand our understanding of the practice of self-​retrospect. In a study of the canon of English poetry, for example, Ballachandra Rajan has drawn a distinction between the incomplete and the merely unfinished. Discussing examples from the renaissance to the period of literary modernism, Rajan argues that the work of a poet takes the form of an open-​ended striving after truth which, because it is open-​ended, is tantamount to a never-​ending mission. On this reckoning, the work of the poet is always incomplete, not merely in the sense of requiring a reader to bring an act of interpretation to the individual poem and hence complete the contract between writer and reader, but also in the direct empirical experience of the poet himself, continually taking stock of

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what has already been achieved in order to transcend it. This suggests, among other things, that a poet’s oeuvre could be considered incomplete even if the works comprising it were each ostensibly ‘finished’. The cases of texts that are both incomplete and unfinished are rarer. Where unfinished works have been discussed in critical research, these have tended to be drawn from the existing literary and historical canon and often date from the distant past. In poetry, Rajan’s own examples include Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590); Coleridge, Kubla Khan (1816); and the last Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970).4 In fiction, we might think of novels such as Austen, Sanditon (published posthumously in 1925); Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870); and Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941). Recent incomplete or unfinished work has received comparably less attention. In fact, this historical bias towards works of earlier periods is not limited to unfinished works and has been operative with regard to late works more generally. One of the main stimuli to the development of this study was the realization that although the concept of late works has been well established with regard to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens, the late periods of mid-​twentieth century writers have received less attention and those of late twentieth-​century writers almost none. This of course is partly because if the ‘late’ stage is defined as an effect of biological age, the works of that stage can only be identified as such after the end of the author’s lifetime. An age-​dependent definition of lateness precludes basic identification, let alone detailed critical analysis, of the ‘late’ works of contemporary artists. But if the notion of lateness is liberated from gerontological age and is supplemented instead with the concept of the retrospective (which can occur at any age), it becomes possible not only to consider the retrospective career stages of writers of earlier periods, but to do so also for writers in the present. Replacing the idea of late with a more critical notion of retrospective thus has the advantage that it enables analysis of contemporary work that would otherwise be neglected for the reason discussed in the Introduction: that contemporary writers tend to be associated too rigidly with the early or mid-​career work for which they are well known, to the detriment of any critical consideration of what comes afterwards. In contemporary poetry, for example, Tony Harrison writes movingly and repeatedly about the contradictory emotional experiences associated with belonging to the first generation of working-​class men to have the opportunity to study at university, and of moving away from the easy companionship of his friends and family as he moved into a middle-​class lifestyle as a result of that transition. Indeed, his poetry represents a continual effort to reconnect with an affective social and geographical environment from which he would otherwise

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have been in danger of isolating himself. His work as a poet is somewhat different from the manual work typically associated with the class background he had left behind, so that his work, that is, the act of writing itself, is a powerful metaphor for the themes it portrays. Several times during the second half of his career he writes poems that are explicitly addressed to one or more of his own earlier poems in order to deepen this sense of a dialogue across generations and to extend it to a dialogue with himself as poet. That is, Harrison continually revisits his work as a way of revisiting his own life. The poetry comments on the life in a way that bespeaks a wider dichotomy between Harrison the poet and Harrison the man, or between his poetic and non-​poetic selves, a gulf his poetry tries to overcome. The use of poetry, books and writing as metaphors for their own creation elevates his work into the metatextual realm that has been associated with both retrospective critical self-​examination and artistic self-​renewal throughout this study. Something similar happens in Derek Walcott’s most recent collection of poetry, White Egrets (2010), in which the poet muses continually on the impossibility of ever fulfilling his poetic vision. Like Harrison, Walcott revisits some of his earlier work and wonders whether he will ever have the opportunity to better it: ‘if it is true /​that my gift has withered, that there’s little left of it, /​… then there’s nothing else to do /​but abandon poetry like a woman because you love it /​and would not see her hurt’5. At the same time that he expresses this fear of not being able to remain creative, however, he also registers a profound dissatisfaction with what he has managed so far. The failure of what he has achieved to match up to his own earlier hope for it then impels him back to further work by forming a new and creative relationship with what went before. Again, the building of this relationship in poetry becomes its own subject so that the poems in White Egrets are strongly meta-​textual in a way that enables a high degree of backward-​looking self-​interrogation in order to explore whether it is possible to move forward. The poetics of incompletion, then, are highly germane to a writing practice that is not only retrospective but, more precisely, self-​retrospective and it might be possible to undertake a further, fuller study analysing the distinct retrospective stages of poetic careers. For the most part, however, in order to generate a clear rationale and a practical set of working parameters, I have focused principally on recent prose fiction. Also in the interest of generating a clear focus, and to reflect my own expertise as a researcher, I have primarily concentrated on contemporary British novelists. The main exception to this was the novel Scandal by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō, discussed in Chapter  3. This was

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included not only because it was a particularly germane example of the homonymic pact under discussion there but also because it seemed to follow quite logically from the theoretical discussion of lateness by Japanese writers Haruki Murakami and Takashi Hiraide that informed the Introduction and hence the definition of the retrospective stage of an authorial career. Although (with the exception of Endō) they fall outside the scope of this study, there is the potential for other researchers to use career construction theory to discuss the retrospective stage of authors from countries other than the United Kingdom or in languages other than English. For example, the American novelist Siri Hustvedt portrayed herself  –​or at least, a writer and art critic called Siri Hustvedt  –​as a minor character inhabiting the otherwise fictional world of her artist protagonist Harriet Burden in the 2014 novel The Blazing World. In the American tradition that includes Sleepy Hollow and Moby Dick, The Blazing World is a novel that wades through different levels of textual fragment:  the editor’s introduction, excerpts from reviews of the fictional artist’s work, interviews with friends and colleagues, edited transcripts of statements made by relatives, excerpts from the artist’s notebooks. There are so many levels in fact that The Blazing World is more than merely metafictive and may better be seen as an example of what was referred to in Chapter  4 as second-​order metafiction, or meta metafiction. That is, Hustvedt employs the fictional practice that Irmtraud Huber calls ‘reconstructive fantasy’ beyond the textual games of postmodernism.6 If it is possible to situate a self-​retrospective fictional practice within different ‘national’ traditions, it would be necessary to consider work in other languages. For example, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes had the habit of referring to himself as a ‘character’ in his own fiction  –​or at least, of creating in his fiction characters with whom he shared a name and who were interested in the same sets of ideas that he was interested in.7 In other words, Fuentes experimented with the homonymic pact that is an important element of a truly self-​ retrospective fictional practice and developed the semi-​fictionalization of his authorial persona that is typical of writers of autofiction. However, much more detailed analysis of Fuentes’s work, in the full context of Mexican and Spanish-​ language fiction around the end of the twentieth century, would be necessary to explore these ideas properly, without reliance on reading in translation. Related to this last point, the career trajectory of existing literary translators is another area that exists entirely outside the scope of the current study, but to which career construction theory might fruitfully be applied. Theorists of translation studies such as Tejaswini Niranjana and Lawrence Venuti have done much

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to explore the cultural and institutional factors that contribute to determining which works get translated into which languages and when. However, the possibility that a translator’s career might have an individual, cumulative temporal dimension has received less attention. Towards the end of The Company We Keep, Booth cites Avrom Fleishman’s idea that D. H. Lawrence’s prose style fundamentally changed in the 1920s after he had translated three works by Giovanni Verga and effectively entered a new career stage.8 But to address this dimension more fully it would be necessary to investigate whether a translator establishes a distinctive idiom that transcends the idiosyncratic differences in style of the different works he translates. For example, Michael Frayn has translated many works from Russian literature and it would be useful to ascertain whether or not he goes through discernible idiomatic shifts at different stages of his career as translator, regardless of stylistic features in the work by the different Russian writers he translates. My focus on contemporary British fiction in English means that I have not considered works of popular culture, or perhaps more notably, works in other media. It is, however, worth remembering that Said’s study of late style was a study of music as much as it was of literature. As I argued in the Introduction, there is an extreme vagueness in Said’s concept of lateness, leading him to use the word late in at least five different ways, without acknowledging his own continual slippage between them. Moreover, ‘late’ works of literature have tended to be discussed with regard to canonical writers of earlier periods rather than recent or contemporary writers. The same appears to be the case in music. For example, it seems that certain works of a modern classical composer such as Dmitri Shostakovich variously accord with each of Said’s ways of figuring lateness, and it might be the case that Shostakovich’s work in different genres reveals a temporal revisiting of earlier works at different stages of his career in order to enable a practice of self-​quotation. Certainly Said associates a degree of meta-​ textuality and meta-​musicality with the latter career stages of modern classical composers, but I lack the expertise to sustain such an argument in detail.9 Finally, I  have not devoted any attention to exploring whether or not the concept of self-​retrospect could arise in drama. Although this is also for the most part beyond my own professional expertise I would like to consider briefly the possibility of a dramatic retrospective practice existing in film, television and theatre. For example, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film Broken Embraces (Los embrazos rotos) employs a metatextual device whereby its director-​protagonist Mateo Blanco narrates to the son of his cinematic agent the story of his tragic love triangle involving the actress Lena and the financial

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backer Ernesto Martel from a standpoint years after it happened. As this retrospective narration progresses, it becomes the story not merely of the love affair but also of the making of the film-​within-​a-​film, Chicas y maletas, on which the three lovers met. Broken Embraces is not merely metatextual in the abstract, but also meta-​filmic in a very precise way. In the retrospective diegesis, whenever Blanco is portrayed working on the inner film, the dialogue and characterization are almost identical to those portrayed in Almodóvar’s own earlier film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). This means that the character Mateo Blanco is a fictional version of Almodóvar himself and the whole of Broken Embraces is an example of what was referred to in Chapter 3 as a self-​ portrait as other. It is also a work of filmic autofiction, not because it adheres to any verifiable facts of Almodóvar’s biography (since this is not really the question in autofiction) but because it presents a fictional avatar of its creator. The character Mateo Blanco plays the role of the ‘real’ Pedro Almodóvar. Isabelle Grell has argued that in the case of cinema, because it is an innately collaborative medium, the coincidence of artist, character and narrator in a single body that is a key component of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact is rare and hence a cinema of ‘pure’ autofiction in Doubrovsky’s sense is rare too.10 This is one of the areas where fictional self-​retrospect differs somewhat from autofiction. The theory of self-​retrospective practice was derived from the field of career construction in which, although individuals are encouraged to see themselves as authors of their own life chapters, they are also positioned as co-​creators of narrative and hence meaning in their life stories alongside their counsellors. This means that fictions of self-​retrospect are also at least potentially collaborative. One of the techniques that enable Almodóvar to cultivate a sense of affinity between his own film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the film-​ within-​a-​film portrayed in Broken Embraces is that he uses many of the same actors in each case. This technique is an example of how a collaborative artistic enterprise develops into a retrospective one: not only the director, but also the crew and the actors engage in the practice of self-​retrospect, revisiting their earlier work to perform it again with a combination of continuity and variation. Two other brief examples of how film actors as well as writers and directors can employ a practice of dramatic self-​retrospect can be found in the films of actors as diverse as Hugh Grant and Patricia Arquette. I have argued separately that although the characters portrayed by Grant across the films Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain (1995), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003) are ostensibly different, they nevertheless represent a gradually unfolding consistent character

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type. This means that there is generic and thematic unity on the one hand, but also a series of gradations and variations as the character is placed in a series of different cultural and historical contexts over time.11 The case of Patricia Arquette is somewhat different. Her role in Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood (2014), and those of all her fellow cast members, was filmed over the course of a twelve-​year period. Ostensibly the film is a gentle but thought-​provoking coming-​of-​age fiction about the life of a child named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from early infancy up to his departure for college. Although his trajectory is fictive, it is embodied in the human existence and tangible physical developments to which the bodies of Arquette and Coltrane and all the other actors are subjected over the duration of that period in the normal course of their lives and which cannot therefore easily be separated from the fiction with which they were living for so long. This interrelationship between the fiction performed by the actors and their lives slowly unfolding in real time renders irrelevant the question of whether or not the narrative resembles their life histories in a factual biographical way. Autofiction arises in the acting performance due to the fact that over the course of those twelve years, the actors visibly change and those changes are etched into the finished film, from beginning to end. Allowing for the specificities of different media, it is a comparable form of autofiction to A. S. Byatt’s Frederica Potter quartet discussed in Chapter 5, where the most innovative feature was the lengthy period of time between publication of each novel so that the author grew up along with her character. In other words, if it would be possible to talk about dramatic self-​retrospect when analysing the careers of filmmakers then it would be necessary to make a distinction between the careers of the writer/​director on the one hand (as in auteur theory) and the careers of the cast and crew on the other, paying attention to the specificities of each. For the time being, without moving into a series of genres of media that are predominantly outside my own focus, all it is possible to do is suggest that such work might be theoretically possible. Related to this distinction between different potential kinds of cinematic retrospects, a similar distinction seems operative in television as well. Although auteur theory was not generally associated with television writers and directors to the same extent as it was with their cinematic counterparts, there are cases where it is possible to consider the trajectory of the individual televisual auteur across different career stages. At the same time, it is also possible to consider the different roles undertaken by one or more actors in different works for television and hence to consider the cumulative relationship between them in an intertextual sense.

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Two brief examples illustrate this possibility. Aaron Sorkin’s American political satire The West Wing (1999–​2006) portrays the machinations of a presidential administration as its members attempt to engineer an electoral majority for one or more policies. Despite a diversity of themes from health care to gun control, and from a president under threat of impeachment to international terrorism, the basic structure of two different factions coming into conflict and then attempting to manufacture consensus remains relatively constant. Moreover, whatever policy or legislative issue is under consideration, these are generally communicated through the means of a presidential address. As a result, much attention is frequently devoted to the writing of the speech in question. Apart from the character of the president himself, the most prominent characters in the series are the White House chief of staff, the director (and deputy director) of communications and the White House press secretary. In other words, each storyline was partly about a given social or political ‘issue’ and partly also about the writing of the communiqué in which that issue would be announced to the fictional public. Typically each episode would show the process of the speech being written, culminate with President Bartlet striding out onto a balcony to deliver it and then break off without the audience hearing it. A typical episode, in other words, was about the act of political speechwriting as such. Sorkin’s next major work for television, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006–​ 07), was about a pair of television comedy writers. In an ostensibly different setting, its format was surprisingly similar to that of The West Wing. Again, it was partly about the manufacturing of consent, this time as the creative writers came into conflict with network directors, advertisers, state censors and various other external agencies. Each episode was again typically devoted to showing how a comedy show was written and again typically breaks off at the moment the show is screened so that the audience see how it is created, but do not see the broadcast itself. This means that writing as such is again the main theme of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. What differentiates it from The West Wing, however, is the synergy of medium and content. Where The West Wing used the format of television drama to comment satirically on the process of political writing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip used television comedy to comment on the creation of television comedy. To put it another way, where The West Wing was metatextual in a loosely generic sense, Sorkin in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip portrayed his own art. The whole series is a further example of a self-​portrait as other. In Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Sorkin also employed many of the same cast members in both major and minor roles that he had used in The West Wing. This leads onto the second potential category of televisual self-​retrospect: that of the

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actors. It would of course be reductive to suggest that a given actor’s given role is defined by the aggregated total of all of his or her previous roles. Nevertheless it is possible to suggest that the later roles remain shot through with traces of the former. In many cases it is likely that knowledge of the interplay between the different roles feeds into an audience’s understanding of the later role, although my main concern here has not been with audience response or reception theory. I am more interested in the possible tactics available to a self-​knowing, reflexive actor for cultivating such an affinity between his different roles and hence enacting a practice of dramatic self-​retrospect in various ways. This self-​reflexivity, for example, is evident in Peter Capaldi’s accession to the eponymous role in Doctor Who in 2014, not least because Capaldi himself had played a very much more minor character in the same series six years earlier. Similarly, when American actor Steve Buscemi played the leading role of gangster boss Enoch Thompson in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (2010–​14), it could be argued that he had cut his teeth playing two different and much more minor characters in the earlier mafia series The Sopranos in 2004 and 2006. Lastly, this very brief consideration of dramatic self-​retrospect would not be complete without thinking about theatre. The clearest case I  know of a stage actor displaying a profound level of self-​awareness and self-​reflexivity in order to use an earlier performance to inform a later one is that of David Suchet. Having played the role of Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot on screen for ITV for twenty-​four years, Suchet then returned to stage work in 2012 in Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night. He played James Tyrone, a sixty-​five-​year old actor whose reputation was based on one single role created decades earlier. Although we cannot speculate on Suchet’s private motivation for accepting the part, there appears to have been a strong retrospective identification between the character and his own professional life –​between, that is, the fact of having been, like his character, very closely identified with one particular role over a lengthy period of time. If it is possible for an actor’s performance to be considered autofictive, then this would have to rank as an example. But as with film and television, such a consideration would again have to make a distinction between the work of the actors and that of the writers. Among recent British playwrights, Isabelle Grell suggests that Sarah Kane’s last play 4.48 Psychosis (2000) is oddly autofictive.12 * * * * * Unfinished work; work from other countries or in other languages; work in other media such as poetry, music, film and television drama; the work of performing

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artists, especially actors. The career construction approach taken for the first time in this study has the potential to illuminate our understanding of these areas too, but with an important caveat. I started by reading the late works of fiction by various contemporary authors and identified certain recurring characteristics and thematic concerns that led me to generate a provisional definition of fictions of self-​retrospect. In other words, the definition followed from the research. If it was merely a matter of ‘applying’ that definition to other kinds of works in other media or from other national or linguistic ‘traditions’, the method would become inverted because such an application would make the mistake of beginning with the definition and then looking for examples that can be assimilated to it. It would become, to use a different term from social psychology, a self-​fulfilling prophecy rather than a really scrupulous research method. If career construction theory were to be brought into one or more of these different potential areas of analysis, rather than simply ‘applying’ the concept of the self-​retrospective in a merely descriptive way, it would be more rigorous and perhaps more informative to approach those other media/​periods/​works by asking a similar set of questions to those originally asked of fiction at the outset of this project. Not only would this approach make it possible to avoid the methodological pitfall of ‘confirmation bias’, it might also have the capacity to say something about the specificities of work in each medium or period and about the precise career stages particular to them. This has been the purpose of liberating the notion of ‘late’ works from the simple fact of biological age, and of developing an understanding of how works produced in subsequent phases of a career chime dialogically –​retrospectively –​with those from the earlier stages.

Notes 1 See, for example, Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes, Salman Rushdie: The Essential Guide (London: Vintage, 2003), which was published two years after Fury but discusses only those earlier novels despite appearing in a series titled ‘Living Texts’. 2 Savickas, Career Counseling, p. 67. 3 Grenier, Palace of Books, p. 99. 4 Ballachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Legacy Library, 1985), pp. 44, 14, 271. 5 Derek Walcott, White Egrets (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 65. 6 Irmtraud Huber, Literature after Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 21.

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7 See Wendy Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), p. 203. 8 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 445. 9 Said, On Late Style, p. 40. 10 Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 89. 11 Dix, After Raymond Williams, pp. 159–​69. 12 Grell, L’Autofiction, p. 82.

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Index age 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 74, 91, 98, 122, 123, 131, 149, 151, 152, 174, 175, 181, 186, 193, 198, 200 cultural construction of 2, 8, 9 decoupled from career stage 5, 10, 11, 59, 151, 152, 166, 174, 181, 184, 186, 201 life stages –​changing definitions 9–​10, 11, 27, 28, 72, 97, 109, 113, 131, 141, 146, 148, 151, 152–​3, 154, 174, 176, 178, 184 Almodóvar, Pedro 196–​7 Amis, Kingsley 187 Angot, Christine 157, 158, 173, 174 apophrades 135, 151–​4 Arquette, Patricia 197, 198 artistic capital 2 Ashbery, John 151–​2 askesis 135, 149–​50 Austen, Jane 193 author function 4, 49, 70, 74, 76, 162 authorial audience 38, 43–​7, 49, 52, 53, 86, 188, 189 authorial signature 4, 31 autofiction 79, 131, 155, 157–​79, 181, 182, 186–​7, 191, 192 Bakhtin, Mikhail 39 Baldwin, James 144 Ballard, J. G. 150 High-​Rise 150 Millennium People 150 Barnes, Julian 76–​80, 158, 170, 175, 179, 189 Flaubert’s Parrot 76, 79 A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters 77, 78 The Lemon Table 77 Levels of Life 79–​80 Nothing to be Frightened of 77–​80 Staring at the Sun 76 Barthes, Roland 161

Bayard, Pierre 110, 115–​20, 128, 132 Bloom, Harold 135–​8, 139–​41, 142, 144, 145, 147–​53 Booth, Wayne C. 5, 37, 44, 47, 71, 76, 97, 169, 191, 196 The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction 12, 12–​15 doctoral supervisor to Peter Rabinowitz 12, 38, 45 The Rhetoric of Fiction 45 Browning, Robert 150 Buscemi, Steve 200 Byatt, A. S. 90–​1, 92, 94–​6, 104, 110, 127, 129–​33, 136 Babel Tower 129–​30 The Children’s Book 91, 92 The Game 90, 91 Possession 91, 94, 128–​9, 130, 154 Ragnarok: the End of the Gods 94 The Shadow of the Sun 96, 104, 154–​5 Still Life 129 The Virgin in the Garden 129–​31, 153, 154 A Whistling Woman 131–​3 canonization 2, 8, 137, 157–​8, 196 Capaldi, Peter 200 career construction theory 13, 15, 37, 39, 40, 41, 60, 112, 113, 114, 145, 146, 177, 178, 181, 183, 185, 188 case studies 18, 19, 26, 32, 60, 62, 89, 114 emergence of 16–​17, 18, 24, 28–​9, 39, 62, 97, 201 main elements of 15–​16, 17–​18, 20–​2, 23–​4, 25–​7, 39, 85, 87, 88, 109, 177, 178, 187, 189 as theory of authorship 28–​31, 32, 42, 61, 66, 90, 121, 145, 179, 186, 188, 195, 201 career counselling 15, 16, 17, 18, 20–​2, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 41, 42, 59, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 85, 88, 89, 110, 111–​15, 121, 145, 158, 168, 177, 188

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Index

career crossroads 66, 111, 112, 177 career education 17, 29, 40, 41, 146 career interview 20, 67, 87, 88, 89 career stages 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10–​12, 14–​16, 18, 22–​5, 26, 29, 30, 32, 37, 42, 46–​8, 49, 56, 59, 61, 67, 68, 91, 97, 109, 113, 128, 132, 135, 136, 141, 148, 151, 152, 153, 158, 166, 167, 174, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187–​92, 194, 196, 198, 201 career themes 26, 27, 38, 109, 188 Carter, Angela 110, 125, 132 Wise Children 122–​4, 127–​8 cinema 125, 196–​8 clinamen 135, 138–​40, 143, 149 co-​construction 14, 29, 30, 67, 68, 69, 70, 88, 188, 197 Cochran, Larry 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 29, 88, 111–​15, 119, 121, 123, 124, 128, 177, 190 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 122, 193 Colette, Sidonie-​Gabrielle 160 collective library 109–​10, 115–​21, 128, 130, 131, 132, 190, 191 Coltrane, Ellar 198 Conrad, Joseph 1, 150 criteria of judgement 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 18, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 32, 50, 112, 113, 125, 126, 152, 153, 163, 168, 177, 181, 182, 183–​7 daemonization 135, 147–​50 decision-​making 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 86, 111–​15, 121, 123, 124, 128, 177, 190 decline narratives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 32, 49, 54, 112, 152, 182–​4, 186, 187 Derrida, Jacques 103 dialogic self 37, 39–​43, 45, 53, 64, 87, 188 Dickens, Charles 143, 193 disequilibrium 31, 111, 112, 128, 177 Doubrovsky, Serge 157–​61, 163, 167, 169, 175, 197 Doyle, Arthur Conan 141 Drabble, Margaret 90, 131 Eco, Umberto 116 Endō, Shūsaku 80–​3, 189 Scandal 81–​3, 93, 189 Silence 80, 81 ethical reading 12, 13, 14 Exley, Frederick 157

exo-​theme 40, 41, 42, 52, 53 experiential repertoire 62–​5, 179, 189, 190, 192 Faulks, Sebastian 135, 141 Devil May Care 141 Jeeves and the Wedding Bells 141 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 143, 193 Fleming, Ian 141 Forest, Philippe 157, 169 Foucault, Michel 4, 49, 161 Frayn, Michael 196 Freud, Sigmund 62, 97, 116, 132, 142, 147, 149 Fuentes, Carlos 195 Galloway, Janice 171 Genette, Gerard 85, 86, 92–​7, 104, 109, 129, 159, 167 genius 2, 8, 14, 30 critique of concept 14, 29–​30, 188 Golding, William 150 Goldschmidt, Georges-​Arthur 170, 174 Grant, Hugh 197 Greene, Graham 80 Guibert, Hervé 170, 171, 172, 173 Harrison, Tony 193, 194 Hiraide, Takashi 7, 195 Hornby, Nick 157 Horowitz, Anthony 135, 141 The House of Silk 141 Hustvedt, Siri 195 Huxley, Aldous 150 implied author 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 49, 52, 97, 101 industrial revolution 15 inner library 110, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 132 intertextuality 2, 11, 28, 29, 30, 32, 46, 131, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183, 187, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199 intimate paratexts 85, 86, 91–​7, 98, 104, 109, 189 Ishiguro, Kazuo 135, 139, 168 An Artist of the Floating World 139 The Remains of the Day 139 The Unconsoled 139, 168