The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton 1527584968, 9781527584969

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The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton

The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton By

Arya Aryan

The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton By Arya Aryan This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Arya Aryan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8496-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8496-9

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................. viii Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Introduction Historiographic Metafiction .................................................................. 5 Anti-representation/ Anti-referentiality ................................................ 6 Representation/ Referentiality............................................................... 6 Heterocosm ........................................................................................... 7 Mise en abyme ...................................................................................... 7 Emplotment........................................................................................... 8 Paratextuality ........................................................................................ 8 Parody ................................................................................................... 9 Self-reflexivity ...................................................................................... 9 Under Erasure ..................................................................................... 10 Postmodernist Re-presentation ........................................................... 10 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 12 Posmodernism and the Problematisation of the Representation of Reality Introduction to Postmodern Theories: Which Postmodernism? .......... 12 The Representation of Reality and its Critique ................................... 16 The Problematisation of the Representation of Reality: Postmodernist Re-presentation vs. Representation and Anti-representation ......... 18 Historiographic Metafiction: “Re-presenting” or “Representing” Reality? ......................................................................................... 26 The Problematisation of the Representation of Reality through Narrative Techniques and Strategies ............................................. 34

 

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Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 42 Heterocosmic World Introduction ......................................................................................... 43 Chatterton as a Heterocosmic Text The Problematisation of the Investigation for Historical Truth: Bringing the Past to Life......... 43 History under Erasure ......................................................................... 55 The Problematisation of Representationality in Literary Realism with Regard to Narrative Conventions .......................................... 65 Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 77 Boundaries Blurred Introduction ......................................................................................... 77 Boundaries Blurred ............................................................................. 78 Meaning as a Process .......................................................................... 90 Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 97 Conclusion Bibliography ........................................................................................... 107

 

 

PREFACE In our rapidly digitizing age, we are constantly subjected to multiple perspectives, mass media, and waves of information (and often misinformation). The postmodern narrative and its storytelling techniques has emerged in recent decades as a crucial way of engaging with and navigating our experiences of representation, meaning, and historical understanding. The postmodern novel indeed reveals to us that literature as well as history are socially constructed. Reality as we know it is not a monolith, but the result of our own individual, subjective experiences with the world around us. Dr Arya Aryan’s The Postmodern Representation of Reality is a masterful analysis of Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton and an essential addition to contemporary postmodern literary scholarship. It is a timely and relevant exploration of how literature and more broadly art mediate our experiences with reality. Aryan’s fusion of literature, philosophy, and history successfully reveals that historiographic metafiction, that is historically rooted postmodern fiction that draws attention to itself as an art form, problematizes the predominant distinction between representational and antirepresentational views. Aryan draws from a wealth of philosophical sources and thinkers, including Derrida, Althusser, and Barthes, and his analysis is thoughtful, lucid, and clearly explained, providing fresh and insightful readings on Ackroyd and other twentieth-century fiction, such as T. S. Eliot. Chatterton best embodies this newfound approach to postmodern blurring of representation and anti-representation, and such an approach is a watermark for further postmodern literary studies on this topic. Most importantly, Aryan presents his philosophical and literary findings in a clear, economic, and effective manner. This study is a pioneering intellectual reading of Ackroyd’s literature, while further cementing Ackroyd’s status as a vital (and contemporary) postmodern writer. Aryan’s The Postmodern Representation of Reality is a triumph for the ages. Dr Curtis Runstedler The University of Stuttgart

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Sarah Catherine-Ilkhani for her kind support and views during the completion of the manuscript. I would also like to thank my dear friend and colleague Dr Curtis Runstedler for editing and proofreading the manuscript and writing a preface for this book. I am also grateful to Dr Sophie Franklin, another dear friend and colleague of mine. Our discussions during our walks in Tübingen kept me motivated. I would like to thank Professor Patricia Waugh for encouraging me to get this project out as a book.  

 

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Recent postmodern literary critics, such as Patricia Waugh and Linda Hutcheon, connect postmodern literature with the paradox of selfreferentiality, that a text is only capable of referring to itself. However, I argue that Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton, as a key example of historiographic metafiction, offers a new perspective into our understanding of postmodern literature. This text reveals that historiographic metafiction not only problematises the representational and anti-representational views of literature, but also offers the text as heterocosmic and hetero-referential, that is, it represents an external reality by referring to real historical events and historical figures while simultaneously challenges its representationality and indicates self-referentiality–that a text is only capable of referring to itself or to another text. I contend that Ackroyd’s Chatterton at once contests both its self-referentiality and representational claims towards reality through certain narrative techniques such as parody, mise en abyme and emplotment. Therefore, the novel subverts a generally accepted understanding of postmodern texts as only self-referential. In the last few decades, poststructuralism has offered a new strategy of reading. Its impact can be seen upon what is generally called postmodernist fiction. Poststructuralists and deconstructists demonstrate contradictions lying at the heart of texts which highly question and overturn binary oppositions. However, they regard language as responsible for selfcontradictions and hybridity in a text. They consider language as inherently unreliable. As Jacques Derrida puts it, “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (2000, 92). However, artistic techniques and strategies responsible for self-contradictory statements have been overlooked. In other words, metafictionists have in a sense revived an obsession with form and artistry. Accordingly, I aim to demonstrate here that this self-contradictory status is achieved by the writer’s artistic

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manipulation of narrative strategies and techniques. That is, I rely upon a postmodern strategy of reading to show and explain the novel’s problematic characteristics regarding specific narrative strategies and techniques such as mise en abyme, parody and emplotment. Moreover, many poststructuralists and the avant-garde practitioners argue for the impossibility of representation in fiction and regard it as antirepresentational as opposed to the representational view of art and literature. These theorists and practitioners call the metaphorical death of fiction as representational, that is, fiction is no longer able to represent the external reality. For instance, modernists extol a work of art to the degree it stands for its own sake and in isolation. Nonetheless, historiographic metafiction aims at both representationality and anti-representationality. In addition, although some have applied theories of intertextuality to metafictional texts, intertextuality has not been regarded as the text’s possibility of representation. Here, I reveal that Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton’s references and allusions to other works establish the novel as representational. However, its references to the process of construction and its own artificiality undermine the very possibility of the novel as essentially representational. As Chatterton suggests, historiographic metafiction is both representational and anti-representational. As a result, it simultaneously connects to the outside world and marks its own fictionality. Accordingly, I also examine how narrative strategies and techniques make this hybrid status of the novel possible. In addition, meaning and reality, which can be used interchangeably, have been either traditionally depicted as natural and final as in realism or totally rejected as in modernism and specifically in the avant-garde (Selden 1989, 50). Literary realism and historiography regard meaning and reality as natural products. The two aspects use language as a medium to depict the outside world. In other words, they postulate the possibility of immediate and direct access to the outside world– representationality of art. On the other hand, modernists lament the lack of meaning and reality. Even Jean Baudrillard, known as a postmodernist, presumes the existence of reality and mourns for its loss in the present era. In Simulacra and Simulation, he casts doubt upon the exchangeability of the sign and the truth and their equivalence. However, his account of how the real is masked and changed to a “pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 2020, 6)

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implies the loss of the real as natural. On the contrary, historiographic metafiction tries to suggest that those phenomena that we may recognise as natural and real are in fact social, cultural and political structures that we manufacture, not given to us. Thus, I argue that Chatterton as a work of metafiction acknowledges the existence of the real and meaning. Nevertheless, it self-reflexively exposes that they are human constructs created in the artistic process of construction. It exposes how we give meaning to historical events through the act of writing and representation. Consequently, I draw upon a postmodern strategy of reading to textually analyse the novel as it does not reject reality and meaning. Instead, it questions and problematises them by offering the possibility of both representationality and anti-representationality of fiction while challenging both. Therefore, the predominant views in treating a work of literature have been either representational (as in literary realism) or antirepresentational (as in modernism) or attributing the problematisation of representationality to language itself (as in poststructuralism). By the same token, I show how the novel parodies historiography and literary realism’s conventions and how it challenges the representational view of art. Afterward, I focus upon how these boundaries are blurred in the novel and how the novel problematises representationality. I examine the novel’s possibility of representation as opposed to modernism’s anti-representational view. Finally, I argue that the novel acknowledges the existence of reality and meaning yet as ideologically constructed in the process of writing as opposed to the idea that postulates meaning as a final product. My applied methodology in this book is deconstructive and based upon close readings as well as textual analysis of the form and content of the novel. I also engage with the scholarly analysis of postmodern theories in literature too to help students of literature who struggle with the theories have a better understanding of them and their application in literature and provide them with both a detailed and in-depth explanation of the theories and a textual analysis of Chatterton, a key example of postmodern historiographic metafiction. I argue that postmodernist texts are heteroreferential as they create a heterocosm as opposed to other representational views as well as a practical, deconstructive and textual criticism of a postmodern text by specifically focusing on the ways the text distorts the

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representation of reality. As Ackroyd’s Chatterton reveals, postmodernist historiographic metafiction is not simply self-referential, as many critics contend, but hetero-referential. It lays bare the paradoxes of selfreferentiality while simultaneously creating a heterocosmic world, hence, hetero-referential. In Chapter Two, I begin by elucidating postmodernist theories and ideas considering historiographic metafiction, with a specific focus upon the concept of representation in art specifically because the novel is mainly preoccupied with its depiction of art both at the level of subject matter and structure. I present detailed theoretical discussions of the narrative techniques and strategies employed in the novel which critique the novel’s representation of reality. In this chapter, I present a theoretical framework of postmodern theories as an introductory section. I also provide the reader with a brief survey concerning the issue of the problematisation of the representation of reality. Then, I discuss and demarcate postmodernist hetero-referentiality or “re-presentation” as opposed to the representational and anti-representational views of art and literature. I argue that postmodernist re-presentation holds a paradoxical position as it is both representational and anti-representational. Next, I elaborate historiographic metafiction’s standpoint towards historical texts and historiography and argue that the mode conflates the historical with the fictive to problematise the representation of reality. I discuss that historiographic metafiction represents, but not represents, reality. In other words, it represents reality whilst undermining the possibility of the representation of reality through establishing an ironic distance and detachment to the reader via narratives techniques. The ironic distance helps subvert the view of art as a truthful, unmediated representation of reality. I devote the final section of Chapter One to historiographic metafiction’s drawing upon narrative techniques and strategies in challenging the representation of reality. Parody emerges as a prominent form, for it is a dominant narrative strategy in the novel which best helps the text create a heterocosmic world. The third chapter then draws upon postmodern theories examined in Ackroyd’s Chatterton to illustrate how it establishes and simultaneously contests the representationality of art and literature. In the first section, I discuss and demonstrate the problematisation of historiography and referentiality in the novel with a focus upon the form and content of the

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novel. I then elaborate the narrative strategies and techniques in the text, especially parody, which make the problematisation of representation of reality possible. In the next section, I explore the novel’s use and abuse of some conventions of literary realism. I also argue and reveal that the problematisation of the representation of reality in the novel is aimed at the level of both structure and subject matter. In Chapter Four, I focus upon the novel’s blurring the conventional boundaries, specifically the one between life and art. Therefore, I mainly expand upon the novel’s hybrid stance towards modernism’s and especially modernist avant-garde’s anti-representationality of art. I discuss the ways the novel demonstrates an ability to make connections with the external reality thereby problematising modernist idea of anti-representationality of art. Then, I explore and examine the novel’s postmodernist perception of meaning, specifically the historical meaning of an event, as constructed in the process of artistic creation. The novel demonstrates and comments upon how in literary realism and historiography narrative techniques and strategies are used and abused in the process of producing and granting meaning to historical events. Finally, in Chapter Five I summarise the most important findings of the book. I also briefly anticipate and share some more approaches and methodologies that can be applied to Chatterton and are appropriate for further researches.

Historiographic Metafiction Coined and applied by Linda Hutcheon, the term “historiographic metafiction” refers to a type or mode of metafiction which juxtaposes the fictive with the historical. Postmodernist re-presentation as it is, the mode is the artistic manifestation of the problematisation of the representational and anti-representational views. It exposes how we give meaning to historical events and experiences through representations. This term reveals historians and historiographers’ narrative strategies and techniques in writing history and about it. Self-reflexive and auto-representational, it explores the process of writing through which meanings and ideologies are granted to historical events by the use of narrative techniques and strategies. This type of fiction examines and points out how we create facts based upon events through representations. It questions and renders problematic our

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possibility of knowing the past. The mode is self-contradictory, paradoxical, self-reflexive, hybrid, representational, auto-representational and consequently problematic. It explores and questions how historiographers provide meaning to historical events by examining and using the forms and contents of the past as well as exposing the ways through which they select the materials from the available sources and documents, critically analyse them and finally put them into a narrative with arriving at conclusions. Historiographic metafiction encompasses fiction, history and theory to offer that all are human constructions (Hutcheon 1988, 5). Historiographic metafiction is a reaction against modernism’s way of looking at a work of art as totally autonomous. In effect, historiographic metafiction challenges the view of the separation of art from culture and society by offering the possibility of artistic representation.

Anti-representation/ Anti-referentiality The term “anti-representation” or “anti-referentiality” is mostly associated with modernist and especially the avant-garde’s mode of art which tries to totally break from the outside world and previous conventions. Practitioners and supporters of the view, instead, aim at writing a work of art which is extremely auto-representational by constantly killing any illusion of realism. They regard language not as a medium to reality, as the representational view requires, but as a target. The anti-representational view of art totally rejects any possibility of the work’s representationality. It marks the death of the novel as representational. The obsession with, and interest in, form and intrinsic features as well as the rejection of the notion of content signal modernists’ anti-representational views. They practice the idea of the work of art as totally autonomous. Standing in opposition to this view, Hutcheon regards postmodernist art as problematically representational and obsessed with history (1988, 52).

Representation/ Referentiality The terms “representation” and “referentiality” can be used interchangeably. The notion of representation known also as mimesis is mostly associated with Aristotle’s ideas expressed in his Poetics. He points to the nature of art as mimetic. In effect, the representational view implies that a work of art is

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a representative of the outside world. In other words, it is a small world (microcosm) reflecting an outside larger world (macrocosm). The view has played a significant role throughout history in literature and literary theories, especially in literary realism. The idea postulates the existence of a natural connection between a work of art and its referents (Quinn 2006, 360). However, the idea that art can represent reality has been challenged put in a crisis in the last few decades.

Heterocosm With regard to the etymology of the word, the term consists of “hetero” meaning other or different and “microcosm” which is a small and complete world that can represent a larger one. In effect, it denotes another or alternative complete world. In modern and postmodern literary theory, the term has come to be applied to the world a work of art creates during the process of artistic creation. As opposed to the classical view of art as being a microcosm which is representative or analogous to a larger world (the macrocosm), heterocosm emphasises the autonomy of art. However, in postmodern criticism and art it mainly refers to a world that the literary work creates in the process of artistic creation which whilst referring to itself can simultaneously refer to the outside world. Indeed, this other or alternative world is created through fictive referents which are constructed within the text by artistic strategies and techniques. This world is governed by a set of rules created in the process of artistic construction which should be acknowledged by the reader (Hutcheon 1980, 90). Heterocosm can be achieved in different ways beyond the text’s possibility by referring to external theories and ideas and to the text’s intertextuality. Historiographic metafiction creates a heterocosm which problematises the representational and anti-representational views of art, for whilst the text establishes connections to the external reality, it refers to its own autonomy by the conflation of the historical with self-reflexive fictionality.

Mise en abyme “Mise en abyme” originally denotes a shield at the centre of which lies a small model and copy of itself. Andre Gide applied the term to a literary narrative technique. In its postmodernist usage, it is a narrative technique

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that self-reflexively echoes and reflects or mirrors itself. In postmodernism, it is used to expose that generally all representations are by nature selfreflexive (Sim 2001, 318). It is a kind of self-reflexive mirroring. For instance, a character in the narrative may feel confused and lost whilst reading a story in which a character feels confused and lost when reading a story. This self-reflexively mirrors and reflects the whole novel’s confusing status.

Emplotment The term “emplotment” is coined by Hayden White and denotes the arrangement of the materials, the previous events, in the act of historiography which determines the meaning of the narrative. He regards history as a process of selecting and arranging information from the available documents (1975, 5). Borrowing the notion from White, Hutcheon contends that facts are constructed by the act of emplotment (1988, 92). By implication, it refers to historiographers’ act of selecting, arranging and putting historical materials from the available sources into a narrative. Historiographic metafiction exposes the ways through which emplotments result in the construction of facts.

Paratextuality The term “paratextuality” is applied to the insertion of footnotes, epigraphs, epilogues, titles, excerpts from magazines and journals, excerpts from other texts in a literary work and so forth in the narrative. Put simply, it is the insertion of history in literature. It is a convention rife in history-writing and historiography. However, it is employed to a large extent in historiographic metafiction to allow the conflation of the historical with the fictive. Paratextuality, therefore, makes possible the representational view of literature by providing a seemingly documentary authenticity within the narrative. Also, it helps the narrative to parody the conventions of historywriting and historiography. As Hutcheon contends, paratextuality relies upon history’s paratextual conventions to subvert historians’ view of documentary authenticity (1986, 303). In other words, it is a convention in history upon which historiographic metafiction draws whilst taking distance from it by questioning history’s authenticity, coherence and linearity.

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Moreover, the use of paratextual conventions in historiographic metafiction provides postmodernist tendency in reviewing the past with a critical eye in the light of the present.

Parody The term “parody” is applied to a comic and playful or serious imitation of a style of a writer, a work of art or characteristics of a serious genre. Therefore, it is a critical re-consideration of a previous past. It is mainly used not to criticise the parodied text, author or style, but to instead question the contemporary issues or special discourses. As Hutcheon observes, in the twentieth century works of art parody’s objective is not the hypotext (1985, 50). Although an imitation, parody marks differentiation within correspondence (Hutcheon 1988, 124). In other words, it is a critical imitation which is selfreflexively aware of its own nature. Thus, in the last few decades it has come to be known as a double-coded and double-voiced deconstructive technique which aims at creating a high degree of self-reflexivity. As an all-purpose commonly-used technique or genre, parody in historiographic metafiction helps to contest the previous conventions whilst still relying upon the very conventions for its effects. It could be a genre, a technique or a series of techniques within a work. For instance, the title of this study, “postmodernist re-presentation,” offers a serious type of parodic technique.

Self-reflexivity Self-reflexivity is a characteristic of many modern literary works and almost all metafiction. Metafiction is more or less self-reflexive or involuted. That is, it refers throughout the story to the process of writing and story making (Abrams 1999, 235). In so doing, the writer attempts to keep readers aware that they are reading a fictive story constructed by some certain narrative techniques and strategies and that the story reflects upon itself rather than upon the outside world. In effect, these may be achieved in a variety of ways using paratexts, quotations, allusions, ironies, intervention of narrator or real characters, mise en abyme and so on ad infinitum. Historiographic metafiction’s self-reflexivity, laying bare narrative techniques and strategies, demonstrates the process through which both writers of fiction and historiographers attach especial meanings to historical events. Contrary

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to modernism, historiographic metafiction’s conflation of the self-reflexive with the historical functions to problematise the representationality and antirepresentationality of the work.

Under Erasure Used by Derrida in his Of Grammatology (1967), “under erasure” (sous rature) is a term applied to the act of writing a word and then crossing it out but not its total deletion. What we then have on the paper is a word which is crossed out (e.g. Derrida). Thus, the result is both the existence and the effacement of the sign and its concept simultaneously. This feature, to Derrida, is inherent in all signs. That is, signs have in themselves the trace of the previous signs. Derrida uses the terms to explain his reliance upon language and at the same time claims that language is unreliable (Sim 2001, 240-1). In metafiction, as a narrative strategy, it refers to the construction of a part whilst withdrawing and rescinding the very part simultaneously. In effect, the narrator may recount incidents and then cancels the very incidents. Nonetheless, they still continue their existence. In other words, they are put under erasure. Therefore, the result would be a fluctuation between two states of affairs which are equally valid. The strategy is frequently used in metafiction.

Postmodernist Re-presentation Unlike modernist anti-representation, the postmodernist mode of representation or alternatively, as I have termed it, “postmodernist representation” does not reject the representationality of art. It marks the inescapability of art as a representational mode. Nonetheless, it questions the representational view’s transparency and naturalness. Postmodernist representation suggests that reality exists but that we know it only through representations. Postmodernist re-presentation recognises itself as representation which makes its own referents instead of having direct accessibility to the real. Therefore, as opposed to the realist concept of representation that postulates a natural and immediate connection between the work and what it represents, postmodernist re-presentation reveals that reality is constructed through artistic representations. However, it acknowledges the representationality of art. In other words, it crosses and

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blurs the boundary between representational and anti-representational views. To achieve these crossings, postmodernist re-presentation relies greatly upon parody and frequently makes representation its subject matter. It is a site where modernist self-reflexivity and autonomy meets with historical and realist representationality.

CHAPTER TWO POSMODERNISM AND THE PROBLEMATISATION OF THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY Introduction to Postmodern Theories: Which Postmodernism? “[A]s a cultural activity that can be discerned in most art forms and many currents of thought today, what I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political.” (Hutcheon 1988, 4)

Strikingly enough, the term “postmodern,” when defined, can be misleading and at times may cause misunderstandings, for it is a word of broad conception. One may possibly encounter various definitions. Such differences and diversities mark the heterogeneity, hybridity, provisionality and multiplicity lying at the heart of this phenomenon. Therefore, to have a better understanding of the term we can define postmodern or postmodernism with respect to three major areas. Firstly, in terms of history, the term postmodern, as the prefix “post” indicates, has come to designate mostly the latter part of the twentieth century characterised by “the prodigious expansion of modern capitalism into what has been termed postmodern/late capitalism” or global consumerism due to the domination of later capitalist system (Bağlama 2018, 11). In this sense, it is known as a period during which the mass media and other means of communication were employed to make impossible the distinction between the real and the spurious fabricating what Baudrillard calls “simulacrum” (1981) resulting in mass consensus and conformity. Consequently, notions of truth, reality, validity, originality, authenticity and depth have lost their traditionally attached values. Thus, the term encompasses historical cultural, social and political concepts. In this light, it refers to an historical phenomenon following and as the consequence of, modernism and the Second World War. In culture, it

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is characterised by a heterogeneity of voices, mass production and popular culture. Since the term postmodernity has many aspects in common with postmodernism and the adjective postmodern interchangeably refers to both postmodernism and postmodernity, its brief explanation seems pertinent. Postmodernism normally refers to “cultural and artistic” areas, whereas postmodernity is used to indicate “the more general social and political” areas (Hutcheon 2006, 119, 121; Eagleton 1996, vii). Likewise, postmodern and postmodernist are interchangeable; however, the former may be applied to any phenomenon pertaining to the contemporary, after modernism, whereas the latter implies a sense of self-consciousness in putting into practice postmodern theoretical issues and is mainly and restrictively applied to artistic works. In consequence, we would rather speak of novels such as Chatterton as postmodernist novels, for they seem to be artistic representations of postmodern theories. Secondly, in terms of theory generated by the first, the term postmodern or postmodernism has been applied to the various writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michael Foucault and Roland Barthes, to name but a few, who were also known as poststructuralists in literary theory and philosophy. Concerned with different readings of a text, these poststructuralists gave definitive shape to postmodern theories. As a leading figure in shaping theories of deconstruction, Derrida holds that the whole Western philosophy has been founded and functioned upon binary oppositions implying a hierarchy; that is, in each binary opposition one takes the centre and is superior or privileged (e.g. man/woman, good/evil, day/night, white/black and so on). He criticises Western thought of creating logocentrism, a belief in the existence of a centre by making metaphysical notions such as “God, reason, origin, being, essence, truth, humanity, beginning, end and self” which determine the way we think and act (Bressler 2007, 120). Derrida, accordingly, undertakes to deconstruct the binary oppositions to stress différance and in so doing to arrive at undecidability or what is known as aporia. His, as well as other postsructuralists’, deconstruction has provided a new reading strategy. Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of metanarratives–fixed ideologies or centres–and his preference for little narratives or the marginalised is closely related to these literary approaches. In a nutshell, in this sense postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard 1984, xxiv) reminding us that the outside

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world is ideologically constructed and made by us, not given to us. Here, the works of figures such as Lyotard, Frederick Jameson and Jean Baudrillard who tried to explain, analyse and account for the present dominant situation, postmodern era, shine. Thirdly, in terms of art and literature, postmodern or as suggested earlier postmodernist is applied to the numerous and various works of Thomas Pynchon, Tom Stoppard, John Fowles, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood and Peter Ackroyd, to name but a few. They are labeled under a plethora of titles, such as Magic Realism, Hysterical Realism, Metafiction and Fabulation. They stand at odds with both the intellectualism and elitism of modernist esoteric high art and traditional theories of art and storytelling. They contest artistic representation prescribed by realism, as well as the universalising concepts of liberal humanism in favor of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-reflexive, paradoxical and popular-esoteric postmodernist works. They attempt to be privy to their own status as fiction and artifice. Metafiction, as a (or the) major postmodernist form of art, marks the problematisation of the representation of reality. Such metafictive works may be referred to as “theoretical novel” (Currie 1988, 49), “narcissistic” (Hutcheon 1980, 1) or what one might prefer to name theory-in-practice narratives, for they are artistic manifestation in literary narratives of postmodern theories. In other words, they are deeply concerned with theoretical issues, especially in the realm of postmodern theories. Thus, far beyond the linguistic obsession of poststructuralism, critics including Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh and John Barth aim at analysing this postmodernist mode of narrative which can be briefly discussed here. Since metafiction came into being and developed, its interpretation has generated hot debate. Realism is an inadequate means of depicting the contemporary socio-cultural situation. Likewise, poststructuralism’s linguistic strategy of reading in approaching metafiction cannot be sufficient because, as mentioned earlier, this mode of fiction is highly selfreflexive, self-conscious, auto-referential or auto-representational, as well as representational in its matter and form. To the consternation of many critics, metafictional novels are not just mere texts and should not be treated as just “a tissue of signs” as Barthes does (2000, 149). They emphasise literariness or narrative strategies and techniques as one might call it in

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addition to contesting language as being able to represent reality, simultaneously converging the borderline between writing and criticism, life and art, as well as fiction and reality. Consequently, a new poetics derived from metafiction may attribute the possibility of having two opposite interpretations not just to the language but to the techniques and strategies employed for the purpose of the problematisation of reality. This seems to have been condoned so far. Better to say, metafiction makes explicit the process by which multiple contradictory interpretations are possible. The mode has brought about its own criticism. This requires what Hutcheon refers to as “a ‘poetics’ of postmodernism” (1988, iv); that is, a new criticism or reading strategy that can justify for this mode. As she puts it, “[l]iterary history suggests that new critical languages are necessarily developed in order to come to terms with new literary forms (1980, 36). Therefore, one should be in search of new theory which can apply to this mode of writing, that is, metafiction. In this sense, postmodern criticism and theory is basically concerned with analysing a work of art in order to make its dominant totalising, naturalising and internalising discourses or metanarratives explicit; to de-centre, de-naturalise and de-totalise them; to regard the marginalized narratives; and to arrive at uncertainty concerning their validity, authenticity, legitimacy and possibility of any representational view of language that lay claims to an ultimate reality. Postmodern theory, in its broad sense including socio-cultural, political, artistic and literary, is primarily concerned with self-contradictory, self-conscious and/or selfreflexive narratives that raise questions as to what reality or “natural” is (2000, xi). As an especial type of narration that Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction” (2000, ix) it explores the ways by which historical reality is constructed. Historiographic metafiction is an investigation of how this especial form of postmodernist art underlines, in its ironic way, the realisation of the process in which ideology of any kind grants meaning to historical events and to our historical and literary knowledge and experiences. As a postmodernist mode of representation, historiographic metafiction renders this meaning-granting process, which might not have otherwise been realised, problematic. Therefore, in this book I aim to develop a methodology for understanding this new poetics, which is herein referred to as postmodernist

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re-presentation, drawn upon theories put forward by Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh and Hayden White, to name a few, in analysing Chatterton. I cite numerous literary theories and philosophers to avoid limiting the perception of postmodernism and metafiction as a homogeneous phenomenon. However, my major concern in the course of the book is with the idea of postmodernist re-presentation in metafiction. In the following section, I discuss and define postmodernist re-presentation in detail.

The Representation of Reality and its Critique “I can endure death. It is the representation of death I cannot bear.” (Ackroyd 1993, 2, 86 emphasis added)

Throughout history, men and women of letters and thought have been obsessed with the representational view of literature alongside with its critique. For many it has almost been a truism that art must reflect the reality of life. Nonetheless, and seemingly an “axiomatic fact,” the idea that literature can represent reality has been questioned. Moreover, in the last few decades there has been a great inclination towards understanding the literary representations of reality, shown with modernists and especially by the avant-garde. However, postmodernist metafiction puts both representational and anti-representational views of art into question, not in a sense that it rejects them but in that it is simultaneously neither and both of them. In effect, paradoxically as it may seem, postmodernist metafiction is both representational and anti-representational. In other words, it signals the problematisation of the representation of reality. Furthermore, such a literary discussion of representation begins with the ancient Greeks. The idea of the representation of reality is of no exception. The representational or mimetic view of literature dates back to two philosophical thinkers: Aristotle and Plato. Yet, this view is more of Aristotelian origin than of Platonic which is in effect “idealistic” (Selden 1988, 8). Nevertheless, one should be cautious enough not to put them into neatly labelled binaries, because, as contradictory as it may appear, Aristotle’s view is idealistic too. Aristotle’s defence of poetry offered what is known as mimesis. He elaborates upon the idea by differentiation in means, models (objects) and manners of imitation. In other words, in so doing and asserting remarks such as “[i]mitation is natural to man”

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(Aristotle 7) he consequently postulates the imitative and representational function of poetry (literature). His view is that a poet should present what is probable (Aristotle 17-18); that is, literature must be true to life. By comparing literature to history, he holds the former as universal and the latter particular, hence, a belief in universality of literature. Such imitative and mimetic view of literature has continued its dominance and gaining prominence in realism that seeks to portray the weariness, dreariness, ugliness and heinousness of the life of the middle class. However, what has come to be known as the crisis or critique of the representation of reality, that reached its acme in poststructuralism, was mainly triggered by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model and observation of the arbitrariness of the relation between the signifier and the signified. As he puts it, “[t]he bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary” (Saussure 2004, 62). Saussure’s view was a turning point. It received an especial attention amongst poststructuralists. Linguistically speaking, the crisis rises when there is no natural relation between the world and the language which is supposed to represent the world. As far as arbitrariness goes, structuralism and post-structuralism are on par with each other. Nonetheless, whereas Saussure stipulates that the relation is fixed, Derrida goes so far as to cast doubt upon the idea by offering différance, a constant delay of the signified and subversion of the hierarchy. Moreover, Derrida’s remark that, “there is nothing outside the text” (1976, 163), an insistence upon what was already suggested by Formalists, sets up an opposition not to the real world but to the ostensibly objectivity and ability of language to represent reality. For Derrida, the representation of reality is no longer possible when there is nothing outside. Consequently, autoreferentiality–the idea that any text refers not to the outside world but to itself as well as to other texts (intertextuality)–has received an especial acclaim in recent decades. As inferred from Derrida, postmodernism questions from within. Therefore, as indicated in this section, the myth of a possibility of language to objectively represent reality thus came to almost an end. In the next part, I explicate postmodernist re-presentation in view of postmodernist narrative.

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The Problematisation of the Representation of Reality: Postmodernist Re-presentation vs. Representation and Anti-representation “The poet does not merely recreate or describe the world. He actually creates it.” (Ackroyd 1993, 115)

Postmodernist re-presentation cannot be enunciated and discussed in a vacuum, for it is the upshot of our dominant cultural and social conditions. Therefore, the notion is exhausted with respect to realism’s representational and modernism’s anti-representational views. This view is firstly a reaction against realist conventions and mode of discourse in general and of writing in particular and the-today-overriding liberal humanism’s totalising notions. Secondly, it contests the autonomy of art put forward by modernists as well as the avant-garde’s anti-representation. Advertently and intentionally paradoxical, then, postmodernist re-presentation is neither of them whilst at the same time encompassing the two. Thus, in what follows postmodernist modes of reference, herein referred to as postmodernist re-presentation, having arisen in the wake of postmodernist metafiction and resulting in the problematisation of the representation of reality, is addressed and demarcated with respect to realism’s representational and modernism’s antirepresentational modes of reference. Moreover, by postmodernist re-presentation I mean the problematisation of the representational as well as anti-representational views through an ironic and parodic re-presentation, keeping both views in a crisis. It is a representation of multiple varieties which “uses and abuses,” establishes and “subverts” what it strives to contest, question and challenge (Hutcheon 1988, 3), whether it be the conventions of realism or those of modernism which have remained inviolable and now turned into metanarratives over the years. Moreover, it does all of this simultaneously. Postmodernist re-presentation aims at making contradictions, lying at the heart of realism and any mode of representation, manifest whilst leaving them instead of trying to resolve them, as does realism. It does not play havoc with conventions. Nor does it naïvely accept them. It is not a rejection, as some of postmodernism’s detractors may claim, of what is known as grand-narratives whose aim is to naturalise, universalise, generalise and totalise (Hutcheon 1988, x). It is but a means of questioning

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them. It makes attempts to de-totalise and “de-naturalize” what we have always thought of as “natural” as a means of divulging to the reader that they are nothing but “cultural” constructs (Hutcheon 2000, 2). Besides, as the prefix “re” in the term re-presentation implies, it presupposes the presence of the past: past (or previous) time, work, style, convention and so on. Be they of realism or of modernism, it plays the conventions off against each other in order to question and problematise any possibility of representation of reality. In metafiction, realism’s apparent transparency, referred to as the natural or the real, recognised as conventional artistic forms, has been under scrutiny but not denied. Thus, postmodernist re-presentation tends to make inquiries into how the real or the natural is portrayed and constructed and how we come to know it. As Hutcheon states, “[t]here is nothing natural about ‘the real’ and there never was” (2000, 33). Postmodernist representation, that is metafiction by implication, does not reject the existence of the real. Nevertheless, it discloses that such representation is a cultural, not natural, product made through representations, hence, problematic. It, therefore, designates the concept of process, that is, the process of constructing and perceiving these apparently real natural truisms. In fact, within postmodernist re-presentation, realism’s apparently unproblematic natural transparency “makes explicit the implicit problematic of realism” (Lodge 1955, 154). This is made possible through re-presenting the process of fiction-making: Any text that draws the reader’s attention to its process of construction by frustrating his or her conventional expectations of meaning and closure problematizes more or less explicitly the ways in which narrative codes–whether “literary” or “social”– artificially construct apparently “real” and imaginary worlds in the terms of particular ideologies while presenting these as transparently “natural” and “eternal.” (Waugh 1986, 22)

Not only is the ability of novel in reflecting reality challenged, but also liberal humanist notions such as universality, originality, authority and the natural as fixed and sacred. Besides, postmodernist re-presentation contests liberal humanism’s attempt to separate the artistic from the real. It does so by making manifest the paradoxes in the integration of the aesthetic and the

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real (Hutcheon 1988, viii), be it political, historical or social. Moreover, a composite of contradictory notions as it is, postmodernism problematises realism’s objectivity, (as well as modernism’s) unity and closure through conflation of aesthetic formal self-reflexivity together with historical backgrounds. Hutcheon observes “[w]hat postmodernism does is to denaturalize both realism’s transparency and modernism’s reflexive response, while retaining (in its typically complicitous critical way) the historically attested power of both” (2000, 32). Paradoxically as it may appear, it adverts to its referentiality and auto-referentiality at the same time. Therefore, resolving these contradictions, an action in which realism seeks solace, is abandoned. This is best done in the conflation of the historical and the fictive. Thus, it is a re-presentation of representation. In other words, as the hyphen in the term re-presentation suggests, it stops to re-think, reexamine, re-view, re-consider, re-meet, re-visit, re-read, re-work and represent (to present again but ironically and critically) the representation of reality. Re-presentation, accordingly, imitates in order to question what it imitates to make the reader aware that any representational view of art is problematic. As Hutcheon argues, it “is less a departure from the mimetic novelistic tradition than a reworking of it” (1980, 5 emphasis added). For that reason, to claim that a novel is an artistic production which has nothing to do with our life and the external reality, as in modernism, is a fallacy due to its very paradoxically imitative characteristics. Closely related to this example is postmodernist re-presentation’s preoccupation with respect to two levels. The first is its aesthetic engagement with language. The second is its referentiality, worldliness. Hutcheon points out the two aspects of a text in that its “own paradox is that it is both narcissistically self-reflexive and yet focused outward, oriented toward the reader” (1980, 7). Therefore, it calls upon readers as a co-creator of the work in the process of creation initiating them into the act of writing. The former marks postmodernism’s autonomy and auto-referentiality or what is known as modernism’s antirepresentation, whereas the latter subverts it by marking its mimetic relation to the real world: [I]n all fiction, language is representational, but of a fictional “other” world, a complete and coherent “heterocosm” created by the fictive referents of the signs. In metafiction, however, this

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fact is made explicit and, while he reads, the reader lives in a world which he is forced to acknowledge as fictional. (Hutcheon 1980, 7)

Put briefly, postmodernism’s self-reflexivity proposes that the work be treated as an artefact, whilst references to the reader’s real life and experience acknowledge the work’s still representational relation to the real life, and thus, the problematisation of the representation of reality. In addition, since many references are made to acknowledge its status as a creative, imaginative, constructed artefact, metafiction creates its own independent world. Nevertheless, it is not anti-representational as modernism claims; however, its referent is artistically created within the fictive world. Its “representation is of a fictive referent” (Hutcheon 1980, 97). Thus, it does refer to itself. It is a mirror held up no longer to nature but to itself. Consequently, any desperate attempt to assess it in terms of its truth value will be of no avail. To do so is to treat the work of art as anything but artifice (Hutcheon 1980, 95). For, metafiction is constantly aware of its status as artifice. Distraught about the combination of the fictive and the real, traditional readers (readers of the realist novel), as is their wont, fail in their attempt to interpret a literary work as direct access to reality. Hence, postmodernist re-presentation imparts the process of its own creation through which meaning is created, that is, constructed to the reader. In addition, there is a distinction between realism’s view of art as a product and postmodernism’s as a process. In the former, the traditional reader, as it is expected, comes to recognise “the products being imitated” to acknowledge similarities they make to the real life (Hutcheon 1980, 38), that is, verisimilitude. This is suggestively referred to as “a mimesis of product” (Hutcheon 1980, 38) in which the attention is drawn not upon the process through which reality is made but upon the reader’s passively accepting its semblance to the real life and experience. Often ignored or depreciated, by contrast, has been “a mimesis of process” (Hutcheon 1980, 39) which in metafiction is of cardinal significance. Accordingly, postmodernist re-presentation implies and necessitates acknowledging the process of construction. In other words, this process involves assembling the artistic materials together in an especial order (artistically) determined by the writer by disclosing and exposing the techniques (narrative techniques or strategies) as well as the process of reading. This constantly

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keeps the reader in a quandary as to the identification of the work as representational or anti-representational. The attention is, therefore, drawn to the process involving narrative techniques and strategies. Closely related to metafiction’s involvement with its own construction process is the dichotomy of telling and showing. Realism and modernism show, whereas postmodernism tells. Waugh compares metafiction with modernism in that “modernism pursued impersonality (‘showing’), such contemporary metafictional texts pursue Personality, the ironic flaunting of the Teller” (1986, 131). This implies two points. First, metafiction is a telling, rather than showing. Second, it is fictive and imaginary. Paradoxically, through telling it exposes its own fictionality and autonomy. Moreover, modernism’s aesthetic autonomy has its root in modernity’s concept of human identity. The concept is in turn derived from “liberal humanism” and “capitalism” (Hutcheon 2006, 120). It assumes “human” as an independent “unique, coherent, rational, autonomous identity” (Hutcheon 2006, 120) which is the only determinant of meaning. Correspondingly, modernism decrees the idea of artist as an autonomous disinterested impersonal “catalyst” (Eliot 2000, 35) who, as the source of meaning, creates an aesthetic autonomous work through formal manipulation of materials. Nonetheless, poststructuralism confutes this credo by proclaiming language as the constructor of human identity. Poststructuralism states that identity and meaning are formed in a system of differentiation which implies dependence as opposed to autonomy. As Umberto Eco puts it, “[n]o fictional world could be totally autonomous, since it would be impossible for it to outline a maximal and consistent state of affairs . . .” (1994, 221). In the same way, one cannot postulate an imaginary work of art as a self-sufficient, independent world. Nevertheless, metafiction indicates both aesthetic autonomy through self-reflexivity and language but not the individual as a meaninggranting significant indicator by subverting humanism’s notion of autonomous identity. It self-reflexively has one eye to its own form suggesting fictionality and the other to historical events, references to the empirical life. Rejecting the text as totally autonomous, Hutcheon says “[t]he most extreme autonomous universes of fantasy are still referential; if they were not the reader could not imagine their existence” (1980, 77). To

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be successfully decoded, then, experimental fiction of any variety requires an audience to make sense out of it by drawing an analogy between the fictive world and that of the empirical. Hence, the reconciliation of the historical and the fictive problematises both modernism and poststructuralism’s anti-representation and realism’s representation. Postmodernist re-presentation holds that neither the world in which we live nor the fictive world of a novel are unreal, but that both are human constructs, granted meanings through the process of representation. It is not that the real does not exist, but that it is neither universal, natural, fixed, nor given to us; it is but created by us. In addition, anti-representation has its root in modernism’s another key concept: loss of meaning. Whereas modernism laments the loss of meaning, postmodernist re-presentation asserts the existence of meaning; however, as postmodernism points out, we create meaning. Hutcheon asks, “[i]s there anything to which we cannot grant meaning?” (1988, 52). One can hardly give a negative answer. Moreover, when we do have meaninggranting, then we are in the purview of social, cultural, political and ideological contexts in which meaning is generated, hence, worldliness, representation, mimesis and reference to the real world. Yet, postmodernist re-presentation calls our attention to the provisional, human-constructing feature of meaning (52) produced through representation. Therefore, it is problematically autonomous whilst remaining referential, representational and mimetic. Furthermore, such a focus upon the process should not lead the reader to diverge from the fact that metafiction is still imitative and mimetic. Thus, a note of caution needs to be made here: “auto-representation is still representation” (Hutcheon 1980, 39), and thus both imitative and mimetic. Therein lies postmodernism’s other concern: postmodernism is not antirepresentational as modernism and the avant-garde by and large are. Scholes’s comments that “[a]fter the first myth, all fiction became imitative,” in that they all imitate other fictions (1995, 24), indicates metafiction’s imitative and mimetic quality. Postmodernist re-presentation, however, subverts the very notion, yet endeavors to formally and thematically problematise both representation and anti-representation. Chatterton takes representation of reality as its theme through Wychwood’s investigation of the true representation of the portrait which seems to be

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representing Thomas Chatterton, whilst it formally experiences the representation of reality by dealing with the life of Chatterton leading to its problematisation. Besides, its allusions to real events in the lives of Chatterton and George Meredith make representation possible, whereas the presence of fictive events and characters confirms the novel’s autorepresentationality. Also, postmodernist re-presentation discloses that modes of representation are ideological constructs; therefore, they cannot help being engaged in political, cultural and social matters. In Hutcheon’s words “postmodern art cannot but be political” (2000, 3). Likewise, Louis Althusser had already defined ideology as “a system . . . of representations . . .” (1969, 231). To avoid the illusion of mass consensus of liberal humanism and our contemporary capitalism, postmodernist re-presentation aims at multiplicity of voices and multiple equally possible interpretations. It renders patent and problematic ideological didacticism lurking behind any representation, be it realism or our contemporary capitalism, which sets to mold and form public opinion leading to mass consensus. As an answer to poststructuralists who, like de Man, deny representational relation between fiction and reality, Lodge as a novelist states: [M]y fiction has not ‘for ever taken leave of reality’ but is in some significant sense a representation of the real world, and that if my readers did not recognize in my novels some truths about the real behavior of, say, academics or Roman Catholics, I should feel I had failed, and so would my readers. (1955, 150)

This is what metafictionists aim for. Postmodernist re-presentation obscures the boundary between the real and the fictive. It integrates “autonomy and worldliness” (Hutcheon 1988, 45). For that reason, we are a step ahead of poststructuralism’s anti-representation towards postmodernist re-presentation taking in both classical and realist representation as well as modernism (Formalism, the avant-garde) along with poststructuralism’s antirepresentation. Put in a nutshell, postmodernist re-presentation is a parody of representation of reality. Parody draws upon familiar conventions to create unconventionality. It imitates in order to create distance from what it

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imitates. Therefore, it cannot be anti-mimetic. Parody is discussed in detail later in this chapter. The avant-garde as an extreme, ardent adherent of the antirepresentational view of art should also be brought into consideration. Revolutionary as it is, the avant-garde is a total break from, and violation of, the past for a celebration of the future. It “destroys, defaces the past” (Eco 1995, 173). Its atrocity is oriented towards the previous and prevailing agreed conventions whilst in search of revolution, experimentalism, innovation, creation, novelty, originality and autonomy. By contrast, postmodernist re-presentation is a return to the past; it makes an ironic and parodic use of it. In the former the writer “indirectly criticizes past forms,” whereas the latter (reflected in metafiction) is directly aimed at the process of the construction of fiction (McCaffery 1995, 182). As reflected in Dadaism, the avant-garde or anti-novel rejects the past as passé by discarding its conventions. In contradiction, metafiction formally and thematically draws upon the agreed artistic conventions so as to challenge them. It first establishes autonomy to problematise it. Experimentalism entails undermining certain artistic forms and the introduction of alternative techniques and strategies (McCaffery 1995, 182). In this sense, metafiction is experimental too. Oddly enough, it is both a constant break from modernist and the avant-garde’s revolutionary conventions and forms which have become obsolete and simultaneously an unvarying continuation and exercise of them: Metafictional texts show that literary fiction can never imitate or “represent” the world but always imitates or ‘represents’ the discourses which in turn construct that world. However, because the medium of all literary fiction is language, the “alternative worlds” of fiction, as of any other universe of discourse, can never be totally autonomous. Their linguistic construction (however far removed from realism they may be) always implicitly evokes the contexts of everyday life. These too are then revealed as linguistically constructed. (Waugh 1986, 100)

Its experimentalism–radical, revolutionary and ahead of its time in undercutting conventions–testifies to its autonomy, whereas its reliance upon the established conventions for parodic purpose invalidates its own autonomy.

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Postmodernist re-presentation does not deny the past; instead, it brings the past to the fore in a dialogue with the present. It is imperative to not create another centre, ideology or metanarrative in opposition to the avant-garde’s craving for novelty, and originality, which are brought under question in postmodernism. Whereas modernism and especially the avantgarde are usually assessed and accordingly valued in terms of the degree of their departure from the conventions to claim aesthetic autonomy, postmodernist re-presentation proclaims any total break from other works and the real world impossible and fallacious. It does so self-reflexively through its ironic and parodic reliance upon the past, be it artistic conventions or real events. Therefore, postmodernist metafiction has made the crisis of representation manifest in that it is neither representational nor antirepresentational but re-presentational. In what follows, I explore historiographic metafiction where the real meets with the fictive giving rise to the problematisation of the representation of reality.

Historiographic Metafiction: “Re-presenting” or “Representing” Reality? “‘Events which are tragedies for us . . . are just changes for them’.” (Ackroyd, 1995 157)

In its attempt to problematise the representation of reality, metafiction is a site where borders and boundaries, pertaining to especial conventions and belief systems such as liberal humanism, including the literary and nonliterary are blurred. Amongst these boundaries is the one between the historical (the real) and the literary (the artistic, the aesthetic) best reflected in, to use Hutcheon’s terminology, historiographic metafiction. As the term suggests, these forms of fiction are those novels which self-reflexively, selfcontradictorily and self-consciously bring the past, historical events, to the fore meeting it with the fictive, that is, the literary. As a result, they exploit and subvert conventions of realism and modernism, which is not a radical contravention of these conventions but an ironic and parodic re-working of them with a critical purpose. In the discussion which follows, I discuss how the conflation of the historical and the literary results in the problematisation of the representation of reality.

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Historiographic metafiction has turned away from the theories and standpoints that see history as a monolith, universal and unified with direct access to the past and reality to embrace views shared by the New Historicists and by poststructuralists separately. One such theory is a response to the traditional separation of the literary from the historical as stated by Aristotle and modernism’s (and specifically the avant-garde’s) differentiating the literary from the non-literary. Postmodernism shares the New Historicism belief “that history is one of many discourses, or ways of seeing and thinking about the world” (Bressler 2007, 214). It views both literature and history as cultural discourses. Both the New Historicists and their British counterparts, Cultural Materialists, reject the artistic autonomy and regard literature as a cultural construct. As with poststructuralists, they view history, akin to literature, as discourse-oriented, part of culture, and thus ideological. Similar to postmodernists, they believe that “[l]iterature is not simply a product of history, it also actively makes history” (Bertens 2001, 177). In other words, and undermining the long-held belief in separation of literature from history, New Historicism decrees that literature and history are similar in producing meaning. This implies the fictionality of history. New Historicists are of the opinion that “[i]n literature can be found history and in history, much literature” (Bressler 2007, 214). Historiographic metafiction, correspondingly, juxtaposes the two to offer the historical as fictive and to manifest both as ideological systems being able to generate certain meanings through narrating. This re-working of the past provides an appropriate ground for “re-working of the forms and contents of the past” (Hutcheon 1988, 5). This act reveals that even the most realistic and true-to-life novels or historical texts are works of art. In so doing, historiographic metafictionists self-reflexively lay bare the artistic conventions through which the illusion of the representationality of these texts is constructed. Artistic conventions of the past and the present are revealed to challenge the ideology “in which they find a home–and a meaning” (Hutcheon 1988, 9), that is, that of liberal humanism. Hence, by the introduction and blurring of the historical and the literary, the view of history as a true-to-life, realistic, monolithic and comprehensible entity is no longer cogent and tenable. Nevertheless, from New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, as for structuralists and poststructuralists, no difference is made between a

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literary text and other texts (Bertens 2001, 177). Metafictionists highlight the aesthetic and literary aspects of their work through self-reflexivity, manifestation of the devices. As discussed earlier, it also suggests referentiality as opposed to poststructuralism’s anti-referentiality by providing references to real events. It poses questions as to how statements such as “Albert Einstein was a physicist” within the narrative should be treated. In addition to these types of statements, historiographic metafiction involves the reader in a dilemma by introducing statements that refer to imaginary, fictive characters, events, time and places, in so doing creating the minimum plausibility resulting in the autonomy or anti-referentiality of the work. This is to assert any mode of representation, be it literary texts or history, is fictive, and therefore an artefact. However, it does not reject the work’s status as a representational mode. Nor does it simply bring the historical to the level of fiction. It both points to the fictionality of the two while asserting their possible referentiality. As a result, conflation of the literary and the historical suggests both referentiality and anti-referentiality, hence, problematisation of representation. In short, history as well as literature re-presents reality. Historiographic metafiction suggests any representation throughout history is constructed by human beings. It strives for demonstrating that, in Hayden White’s terms, “every representation of the past has specifiable ideological implications” (1990, 69). Ideologically grounded, these socalled classical representations of literature and history have had an interest in producing meanings which attribute to maintaining the status quo. As White observes, “[h]istory becomes history of exclusion. He [the historian] makes his story by including some events and excluding others, by stressing some and subordinating others. This process of exclusion, stress, and subordination is carried out in the interest of constituting a story of a particular kind” (1975, 6). Foucault, instead, suggests a story of a multiplicity of narratives as opposed to the traditional histories which try to obviate differences to create a firm story (Currie 1995, 12-13). Like fiction, history in postmodernism is considered as a discourse by which “we construct our versions of reality” (Hutcheon 1988, 40), that is, meaning. History as a helpful realist model and an example of a set of metanarratives offering certainty, eternalness, coherence, unity and referentiality which formally and thematically lay claims to reality is

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employed in postmodernist historiographic metafiction to accentuate its fictionality and is, therefore, acknowledged as a human construct. As a narrative form in prose, history resembles realist novels. Both necessitate narrative form and detailed objective accounts of characters and events in chronological order. “Realism presents history as linear chronology, presents characters in the terms of liberal humanism” (Waugh 1986, 128), as does historiography. Historiographic metafiction raises questions about objective recording, that is, documentary realism which creates the illusion of plausibility in both literary realism and historiography by playing the realist conventions off against each other. In historiographic metafiction, linear chronology, omniscient point of view and documentary realism of both literary realism and historiography are examined to make their ideological grounds explicit. This is done by self-reflexive exploitation and simultaneously subversion of the realist conventions shared by literary realism and historiography at the level of form and subject matter. Furthermore, history in postmodernism is similar to fiction because it is treated as a discourse through which “we construct our versions of reality” (Hutcheon 1988, 40), that is, meaning. Not in the sense that certain events under scrutiny did not happen but that what these events mean is determined by the way they are narrated. It is not a denial of the existence of the past, however, “its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality” (16). Therefore, both require narration, text. What historiographic metafiction aims at is how historical events are turned to seemingly neutral facts. In Hutcheon’s terms “the meaning and shape are not in the events, but in the systems which make those past ‘events’ into present historical ‘facts’” (1988, 89). In delineating how facts are constructed, borrowing from White, Hutcheon refers to the idea of emplotment by which is meant the configuration of events in the narrative. As she states, “[i]t is historiography’s explanatory and narrative emplotments of past events that construct what we consider historical facts” (1988, 92). The past is conceived through the narrative and produced in a milieu with a set of preponderant ideologies. The ways in which real events are narrativised condition their meanings. In effect, historiography “imposes a meaning on the past” (Hutcheon 1988, 97) and is revealed in historiographic metafiction by self-reflexive conflation of the literary and the historical.

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This blurring of historical and literary boundaries also suggests both referentiality of art and artificiality of history and reality. White refers to the overlap of the fictive and the historical in that both are “verbal artifacts” (2000, 291). The two are mimetic and expressive. He regards history as fictive and fiction as referential (2000, 292). Nonetheless, while he points to two features of correspondence and coherence as their site of overlap, metafictionists seek to problematise the notions and to reveal that they are not intrinsic features, but that they have been foisted upon us. In other words, documentary narrative strategies of both literary realism and historiography create the illusion that the text is comprehensible and corresponding to the real world. Moreover, history has been postulated as mimetic genre–a showing implying liberal humanist notions such as objectivity and impersonality in the vein of literary realism. On the contrary, historiographic metafiction casting a doubt upon the view is more of a telling. Implied by Aristotle, diegesis entails telling as in the epic genre in which a narrator recounts the story, whereas mimesis indicates showing as in drama, presenting the action objectively and impersonally (quoted in Wake 2006, 19). Not unlike Lodge’s differentiation between “telling” and “showing” (1992, 122), metafiction approximates the diegetic model, for its principle draws upon self-reflexivity to call attention towards the process of its construction. Historiographic metafiction asserts that all seemingly realistic representations, such as history, are a kind of telling rather than showing by self-reflexively pointing out the process of storytelling to highlight the artificial and artistic process of construction, hence, historiography as artifice. In effect, ideologies that lie buried in the stories (history and realism)–especially those of liberal humanism including objectivity, impersonality, universality, truth, order and rationality–are marked by making narrative strategies and techniques manifest. Therefore, the traditional ideological dichotomy of the historical (the real by implication) and the fictive (the literary, the aesthetic) which implies a binary opposition through which the reader is called upon to regard the literary as unreal, provisional, anti-representational and thus inferior and its opposite, that is, the historical as real, objective, universal, natural, representational and thus superior is highly questioned. Accordingly, in both (history and literature) meaning is an artistic and artificial construct. On the other hand, metafictionists’ interest in historiography is also a

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reaction against modernism’s autonomy (Hutcheon 1988, 88). Modernism denies “the validity of the past” (Hutcheon 1988, 30), an idea highly underpinned by the avant-garde which attempts to efface the past. Postmodernism’s response to the principle is a dialogue with the past. According Evo, the past “must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently” (1995, 173). This is an ironic critical return to history. In truth, these metafictional novels are reconstructing the past with a critical eye. Whereas modernism is nostalgic, a perspective shared by some postmodernists such as Jameson in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), historiographic metafiction is a constant everlasting critique, not a nostalgic return. The mode of historiographic metafiction “is always a critical reworking not nostalgic as in modernism” (Hutcheon 1988, 4, 195). In modernism we have a nostalgic return craving for the loss of (universal) meaning, centre, coherence and unity, whereas postmodernism is constantly critical of the past. The modernist credo reverberates in William Butler Yeats’s words: “the centre cannot hold” (1987, 2308) which presupposes the existence of a centre that used to hold. The postmodern credo, however, is clear in Derrida’s words: “I didn’t say there was no center, that we could get along without the center. I said that the center is a function, not a being– a reality, but a function” (quoted in Marshall 1992, 89). Therefore, postmodernism does not lament the loss of centre or meaning. It confirms the centres but challenges them to make their ideological implications bold suggesting in this way they are not natural but human constructs. Liberal humanism’s universal notions including unity and coherence, as prescribed by realism in a way and in modernism in another, have an ideological basis. They are the terms under the rubric of which it becomes legitimate to suppress other voices that stand in opposition to the dominant discourse which tries to resolve the contradictions and bring about mass consensus. Although fragmentary, modernism seeks to unify its seemingly irrelevant fragmented parts. In contrast, in metafiction, modernism’s conviction of unity irrespective of the work’s disintegration is challenged by violating the work’s supposed unity through leaving contradictions unresolved. Furthermore, realism’s seemingly resolved paradoxes enhance liberal humanist notions of reality, neutrality and naturalness. On the other hand, metafiction demonstrates and celebrates the

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problematisation of such contradictions (Waugh 1986, 6). It is fraught with contradictions. It is a site where aesthetic forms and historical grounds are conflated to remain unresolved. This type of fiction “keeps distinct its formal auto-representation and its historical context and in so doing problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge, because there is no reconciliation, no dialectic here–just unresolved contradiction . . .” (Hutcheon 1988, 106). The biggest postmodernist contradiction is that the self-reflexive (the aesthetic) and the historical (the real) are interwoven to offer any representation as a construct, fabrication or artefact. As Waugh puts it, “[n]on-fiction novels suggest that facts are ultimately fictions and metafictional novels suggest that fictions are facts. In both cases, history is seen as a provisional construct” (1986, 105). Historiographic metafiction provides the unresolved confrontation of self-reflexivity and the documentary realism of historiography leading advertently to problematisation of representation which produces the illusion of coherence, universality, centre, objectivity, naturalness and neutrality. Amongst liberal humanist notions aiming at unity, coherence and reality is the idea of a beginning, a middle and an end (similar to Aristotle’s unity of plot) in the narrative to foster the illusion that it is portraying things as they are (“slice of life”) in a linear chronological order for the reader. Realism purports to assume the status of a camera objectively portraying life. White’s differentiation between chronicle and story is akin to the one between event and fact by postmodernists. The historian’s arrangement of events in the chronological order with a beginning, middle and end leads into the production of different “functions” (White 1975, 7), that is, different facts or meanings. As a result, “[o]ne man’s ‘reality’ was another man’s ‘utopia’” (White 1975, 46) in a given history. On the other hand, modernism has taken leave of the structure in that it offers an ambiguous open ending. Whilst modernism does violate realist chronology by, for instance, expressionistic fragmentary narrative, metafiction does not totally abandon the historical. By contrast, in metafiction notions of beginning, middle and end are all shown to have been artistically and artificially self-reflexively contrived by the narrator; that is, they are the narrator’s matter of choice and configuration. It presents multiple but not open and ambiguous endings. In other words, modernism is for the “either/or” pattern, whereas metafiction is for “both/and” (Hutcheon 1988, 49). All these narrative techniques are

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used in order to be subverted as a critical commentary upon the objectivity and impersonality of any realistic representation. Consequently, it points to the artificiality of all representations. Instead of the seemingly monolithic closure provided in literary realism and historiography and modernism’s ambiguity, metafiction offers multiple equally possible endings. Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin, it can be read as heteroglossic; that is, it aims at plurality of discourse to include the suppressed little narratives to problematise the purportedly unified discourse of realism. In addition, realism’s convention of the omniscient point of view implying a guarantor of ultimate meaning, as a liberal humanist notion, is both exploited and subverted, for it implies a God-like author. The conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved in realist fiction through their subordination to the dominant voice of the omniscient author. However, since the guarantor of meaning has been questioned, for instance in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations, a coherent omnipotent power who has a control over the meaning of the text gives its way to a fragmented, disrupted narrative. In metafiction, different narrative voices which are at odds with each other may be used, as in Chatterton in which the real Thomas Chatterton gives a biographical account of his life. Realism, often regarded as the classic fictional mode, paradoxically functions by suppressing this dialogue. As a brief recapitulation, the way we represent an event determines the meaning of that event. In other words, “our common-sense presuppositions about the ‘real’ depend upon how that ‘real’ is described, how it is put into discourse and interpreted” (Hutcheon 2000, 31). Therefore, we may come to know the real only through representations. In addition, since these representations are human constructs and consequently ideologically grounded, re-working and re-reading them, that is re-presenting them, helps us recognise ideologies and strategies employed to achieve that purpose. How historical documents of real events are put together decides the reality– the meaning–of that especial narrative representation that we call history. As discussed in the previous section, this shows that history is a process, not a product. Moreover, history like literary realism is fictive since it assumes the same strategies of narration and characterisation, as a novel does, that are laid bare in metafiction. What postmodernism tries to divulge to the reader is that our understanding of the present is only possible through

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representations. As Hutcheon observes, “postmodernism reveals a desire to understand the present culture as the product of previous representations” (2000, 55). It also makes the ideological grounds of these representations manifest by way of commenting upon the ways and strategies through which different representations and meanings claimed to be universal are constructed. History, as well as literary realism, is not a window directly open to real life and to the past but a process through which actual past and real events are turned into facts and reality. Accordingly, any attempt to achieve a monolithic understanding of the past, as metafictionists reveal, is a failure. In short, the answer to the question of how we can come to know the past is through representation and narration. As Hutcheon states, “[k]nowing the past becomes a question of representing, that is, of constructing and interpreting, not of objective recording” (2000, 70). Moreover, in historiographic metafiction where the historical and the literary are conflated, the historical gives credence to the literary, whilst the literary undermines its referentiality leading to the problematisation of the representation of reality. Therefore, the conflation of the historical and the literary–the arrangement of materials–results in the problematisation of representation. In the next section, I delineate narrative strategies or techniques which lead to such problematisation.

The Problematisation of the Representation of Reality through Narrative Techniques and Strategies “And what better weapon to use against a forger than another forgery?” (Ackroyd 1993, 139)

Of central significance and interest, yet often overlooked by critics, is metafictionists’ concern and obsession with narrative strategies and techniques that imply literariness. Availing themselves of the contribution that Formalists, especially Viktor Shklovsky, made to literary criticism and practice, metafictionists have practiced and focused upon narrative techniques in providing problematisation to the extent that they have taken the concern as their theme, if any. Their self-reflexively manifesting the process of construction in their works does indicate the degree of this obsession. Russian Formalists view art as autonomous with the aim to

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distinguish the literary from the non-literary and the form from the content with the prior parts of these binary oppositions as the privileged and valued. Nonetheless, metafictionists cast doubt upon such distinctions so far as to assert that one may find as much literariness and fictionality in a literary work as one may in an historical non-literary work, for instance. Metafictionists, in the vein of Russian Formalists, lay bare the (literary) devices as “the most essentially literary thing a novel can do” (Selden 1989, 12) in their narratives to problematise the representation of reality. Metafictionists’ narrative strategies and techniques remind the reader of Shklovsky’s two key terms in the process of narration. He refers to the “raw material” or the “story” as “fabula” to be shaped by the writer into plot, called “suzet” (2004, 13). Likewise, metafictionists assume an almost similar strategy of writing through their self-reflexively manifesting narrative strategies and techniques yet with different purpose. As mentioned earlier, although Russian Formalists are committed to keep such dichotomies, metafictionists and deconstructists blur any boundary to assert difference and multiple interpretations in their perspective and aim, each of which being constantly at odds with each other, so as to problematise literary, cultural and historical conventions. This is the paradox of postmodernism: to use the previous conventions whilst simultaneously subverting them. That is why metafiction, unlike esoteric elitism and hermeticism of modernism, is popular and entertaining whilst still remaining esoteric and elitist. This is best illustrated in the detective plot structure of most metafictional novels including Chatterton analysed in this study. Metafiction’s degrees of formalism and its concern with narrative strategies take for instance the statement “godisnowhere” which may have two absolutely opposite meanings: “god is now here” and “god is nowhere.” Poststructuralists (deconstructists) would argue this paradoxical state is language itself, concluding that language is inherently unreliable. In other words, for structuralism and poststructuralism, meaning is placed in the structure. Nonetheless, to ascribe such a double-voicing feature only to the nature of language is to underestimate a major contributory factor: artistry or literariness. In addition to the inherent unreliable nature of language, as a metafictionist would hold, this double-voicing (similar to Shklovsky’s fabula), which would have not otherwise been self-contradictory, is elicited due to the juxtaposition of the letters (suzet) in this especial order. Indeed,

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it is not only the inherent unreliability of language that makes such doublevoicing paradoxical statements, but also, the juxtaposition of the materials decided by the writer. Thus, in this sense and as it implies, the term post-formalism is suggested in this study, for metafictionists’ obsession and concern with degrees of formalism as well as its postmodernist deconstructionist perspective to create problematisation. Postmodernist metafiction’s craving for degrees of literariness can possibly be interpreted as a reaction to linguistic approaches such as structuralism and poststructuralism dominant in the last few decades. As John Barth states, “I’m inclined to prefer the kind of art that not many people can do: the kind that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas and/or inspiration” (1995, 163). Metafiction is concerned with the process of fiction-making. Moreover, “making” implies artistry, expertise, techniques and in this case literariness. Accordingly, the problematisation of the representation of reality is best achieved through resorting to narrative techniques and strategies. Yet, the attempt is homage to and a critique of modernist aestheticism, a use and abuse of modernist conventions. Indeed, for that reason, historiographic metafiction’s conflation of the historical and the literary is an attempt to demonstrate even the most seemingly objective realist works such as history does employ literary narrative strategies to a certain degree to produce meaning. It also manifests how meaning of an historical event is constructed. In a sense, Aristotle’s notion of mythos, “the arrangement of incidents,” (13) seems to have been enlivened in metafiction. Historiographic metafiction’s modernist selfreflexivity together with the historical results in the problematisation of the representation of reality which is only possible through exploitation of narrative techniques and strategies. This is very crucial to the apprehension of the significance of narrative techniques. As mentioned earlier, the past does exist, but our understanding of it or our historical knowledge of it is through narrating, selecting and arranging of events or, to use White’s terminology, “emplotment” (1975, 7). He defines the term as “the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind” (1975, 7), that is, of certain meaning and ideology. In other words, to White, the mode of explanation, bearing resemblance to the mode of representation–the way it is narrated–

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determines a single event to be a comedy or tragedy (1975, 27). Accordingly, especial narrative strategies may lead to generating especial meaning(s) taken to be real and natural. White acknowledges history as a process “of selection and arrangement of data from the unprocessed historical record” (1975, 5). Historiographic metafiction aims at highlighting this function and the arbitrariness of the meaning of a text, be it literary or historical, through self-reflexively manifesting narrative techniques and the process of construction in general. Likewise, as Hutcheon emphasises once more, “while events did occur in the real empirical past, we name and constitute those events as historical facts by selection and narrative positioning” (1988, 97 emphasis added). Consequently, manifesting narrative strategies and techniques reveals the artificiality of meaning. The blurring and conflation of the historical and the literary in historiographic metafiction thus provides a useful foundation for analysing, re-considering and re-reading the conventions of the past. It gives the opportunity for “rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (Hutcheon 1993, 246). Re-working the forms, which is ironic and parodic, is an indication of historiographic metafiction’s aesthetic and artistic status which implies autonomy, whereas its content, mostly dealing with history, signals its possible referentiality, hence, problematisation of representation: Postmodernism both asserts and then undercuts this view, in its characteristic attempt to retain aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the “world.” But, it is not a return to the world of “ordinary reality,” as some have argued (Kern 1978, 216); the “world” in which these texts situate themselves is the world of discourse, the “world” of texts and intertexts. This “world” has direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that empirical reality. . . . What historiographic metafiction challenges is both any naïve realist concept of representation but also any equally naïve textualist or formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world. (Hutcheon 1988, 125)

Therefore, the conflation of the literary and the historical enshrines and includes both the world and the art through artistic exploitation of narrative techniques and strategies in re-working historical events and incidents. The

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historical gives credence to the literary and testifies its reality and referentiality, whilst the literary contests any possibility of representationality by introducing fictive characters and incidents besides the real historical characters and events, in so doing drawing the attention to the meaningmaking process of historiography. That is, historical characters and events make the fictive real and historical, whereas imaginary characters and incidents render the historical fictive; hence, each challenges the validity of the other. In so doing, “[h]istory ceases to be a great, universal story of human progress and becomes a field of conflict where different interests and narratives interweave with and question each other” (Malpas 2005, 99). As a result, since fiction and historiography merge, they come to share similar characteristics; therefore, unlike Aristotle’s claim, literature’s universality is problematised. Instead, it offers heteroglossia and multiple histories all of which, to borrow from Barthes, “blend and clash” (2000, 149). In what follows, salient narrative strategies and techniques which make the reworking of the conventions of the past possible and lead to the problematisation of the representation of reality are expounded. Parody merits especial treatment in this study and Chatterton. Firstly, it is one of the most effective and dominant techniques or genres (in metafiction) in playing artistic conventions off against each other resulting in the problematisation of the representation of reality. Secondly, most narrative techniques and strategies in Chatterton as well as many other metafictional novels can be delineated in the light of parody, since they are parodic and ironic in function, which serve the purpose of challenging the representation of reality. Moreover, parody is a key element in re-working and re-writing history and in juxtaposing the historical with the literary with its critical purpose, hence, problematisation. For that reason, this study focuses upon parody’s characteristics in contesting representation of reality. Furthermore, two-voicing or to use Charles Jenck’s coinage “double-voicing” (quoted in Dentith 2000, 165), parody makes conventions bold through imitation with critical distance and in so doing problematises the apparently real and natural status of facts. Both history and literature employ a set of narrative conventions. Moreover, since parody is one of the best ways to confront the past with the present (Hutcheon 1995, 86), it exposes the conventionality of both literature and history writing as human constructs. It suggests the past does not expire but that it is always open to

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interpretation. Parody makes the past “a ‘living present’” (Hutcheon 1985, 42) by drawing attention to the process of creation. Nonetheless, it is not “a nostalgic ‘return’,” as in modernism (Hutcheon 1988, 4), but instead an ironic critical one. As sophisticated as the term is–since it requires the reader’s knowledge of recognising “literary codes” (Hutcheon 1980, 25)– parody self-consciously and self-reflexively alludes to the historical past to indicate the impossibility of objectively imitating the past. For, any imitation necessitates deviation, therefore, similarity together with difference. This suggests that historiography, as a form of imitation, necessitates distortion; consequently, history’s as well as literature’s referentiality are problematised. The gamut of parody may range from a single technique or strategy or a precursor text, to a whole aesthetic, discourse or a whole set of conventions in order to manifest ideologies hiding behind it. It does so by revealing literary and cultural conventions. In historiographic metafiction, the problematisation of representation is made possible through parodic rewriting and re-working of conventions of historiography and those of modernism. Accordingly, liberal humanism’ assumptions of origin and universality as well as modernism’s aesthetic autonomy are contested, for parody re-works through similarity with critical distance. Therefore, it draws upon the very conventions that it tries to contest. It exposes the values of the parodied discourse or text which Genette calls “hypotext” (quoted in Dentith 2000, 12) by using and abusing the conventions of the discourse. Subsequently, since history uses realist conventions, different realist strategies of literary realism and historiography are parodied including the use of omniscient point of view, autobiography, extracts from magazines and journals, paratexts such as epilogues and prologues and intertexts. It parodically makes use of the conventions of historiography and then places them under erasure. Parodic re-writing the historical and the literary simultaneously shatters any illusion of a monolithic universal meaning of history by suggesting multiple possible versions of a single event through, for instance, a variety of point viewpoints challenging history writing and literary realism’s omniscient point of view. On the other hand, modernist aesthetic autonomy is challenged, for “[p]arody historicizes by placing art within the history of art” (Hutcheon 1985, 109). This principal element questions modernism’s, especially the

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avant-garde’s, conviction of innovation and creativity, whose aim is a total break from the past, through using the previous techniques and strategies which simultaneously offer both creativity along with imitation, that is, similarity with critical distance. It, therefore, suggests both representationality and anti-representationality and thus problematisation. As a form of selfreflexivity (Hutcheon 1985, 28, 35, 49), parody creates and re-creates the historical past to disclose any re-creation, such as historiography, entails imitation alongside deviation and distortion. It can be suggested that parody is the re-cycling of disposable materials. Whilst historicising and consequently offering referentiality, parody demonstrates that meaning of an historical event is contextualised through a set of narrative strategies and juxtaposition of materials. Indeed, self-reflexivity undermines referentiality. What we can learn from postmodernism is that “[p]arody . . . can historicize as it contextualizes and recontextualizes” (Hutcheon 2000, 178). Postmodernism’s concern with art is best revealed through parody. It marks the self-representationality by re-working conventions of writing (Hutcheon 1985, 28, 35, 85). Therefore, parody reveals that our understanding of the past is only recognised through re-creating the past. That is, history is always a re-working–imitation together with difference–which naturally draws upon narrative strategies and techniques. This self-reflexive exposure, in turn, highlights the fact that the meaning of an event is a human construct produced through these narrative strategies and techniques. Parody, in its paradoxical confrontation of literary with the historical, also makes use of paratextuality, that is, “footnotes, subtitles, prefaces, epilogues, epigraphs, illustrations, photographs, and so on” (Hutcheon 1986, 301). This critically problematises the status of history as real by offering representationality whilst undermining it by the fictive. Paratextuality might be the most important mode or element in placing the historical into the fictive (Hutcheon 1986, 303). Furthermore, since a great propensity has been directed towards reading literary texts for their historical facts, its parodic re-working in historiographic metafiction, accordingly, is both a reaction against such a tendency for a view holding the fictionality of all history and the possible historical referentiality of literature. For instance, the writer of Chatterton provides the reader with a prologue which has a double-voicing function in that it gives real historical information at the very beginning to be distorted later in the course of the

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novel. This seemingly realistic document suggesting a high degree of reality is challenged when different interpretations are made possible throughout the novel. In effect, whilst different forms of paratextuality offer representationality, they “are still created forms” (Hutcheon 1986, 302), that is, made by us. The arrangement of historical documents, alongside the fictive, both establishes the possibility of referring to the real world and subverts its possible representationality. Both paratextuality and the fictive “inscribe and undermine the authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations” (Hutcheon 1995, 90-1). In historiographic metafiction, paratextuality re-enacts the past by referring to the seemingly original; however, deviation from the original by the fictive, done by parody, divulges any seemingly original historical document is an artistic creation and that in historiography literary narrative techniques have always been used to foster the illusion of historical originality. Further, since the existence of the past is not rejected, literature seems to refer to reality. In historiographic metafiction, paratexts work paradoxically in that they make allusions to the outside world whilst paradoxically reminding the reader that our knowledge of the world is only through “texts” (Hutcheon 1986, 310). In effect, the borderline between the literary and the historical is blurred. Consequently, in this chapter I expounded historiographic metafiction in the light of postmodernist re-presentation. As revealed, historiographic metafiction re-presents reality, that is, it discloses that meaning, and reality, is a human construct created through the way the narrator puts fictional elements together by using parody. In the next chapter, drawing upon the theories discussed here, I examine Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton with regard to certain narrative techniques and strategies such as parody.

CHAPTER THREE HETEROCOSMIC WORLD Introduction “‘I will bring the Past to light again.’” (Ackroyd 1993, 51)

In this chapter, I analyse Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton in light of postmodern theories discussed in the previous chapter. As a type of historiographic metafiction, the novel investigates an historical event, the death of Thomas Chatterton, providing different versions of reality to problematise the representational and anti-representational views of art and literature through narrative strategies and techniques. Also, I contend that as opposed to a dominant view that postmodern texts are self-referential, the novel as a paragon of historiographic metafiction consciously points out the paradoxes of self-referentiality while it simultaneously creates a heterocosmic world, that is, it refers to an external reality and to itself at the same time while contesting both. Accordingly, in this chapter I explore the novel’s narrative strategies and techniques that delineate the texts’ meaning-granting process and create this heterocosmic world. Finally, I examine the novel’s selfreflexivity in laying bare its own methods of writing and therefore challenges the representation of reality. In other words, the style of the writer reflects the subject matter and vice versa. The novel investigates how meaning is constructed and how events are granted meaning–how facts are fabricated. It also reveals the fictional nature of reality as opposed to literary realism’s postulation of reality as final. Accordingly, I show that Chatterton is a parody of an historical book and historiography which sheds light upon the nature of facts and reality and the ways we come to know the past. The novel illuminates how narrative strategies and techniques in historiography and history-writing are employed to create what we regard as incontrovertible facts. Indeed, it is an

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artistic demonstration of what happens when modernist autonomy coincides with realist representationality. In addition, parody plays a highly significant role in Chatterton. Besides questioning the possibility of representation in art, it problematises the notion of originality and autonomy of art deeply propagated in modernism and specifically in the avant-garde. Chatterton parodically and simultaneously draws upon and withdraws from previous conventions, including those of modernism, to question the notions as defined by modernists.

Chatterton as a Heterocosmic Text The Problematisation of the Investigation for Historical Truth: Bringing the Past to Life “[T]he Living and the Dead were to be reunited.” (Ackroyd 1993, 52)

Peter Ackroyd is mostly critical of the instrumentality and representationality of language in many of his works specifically in Chatterton. In this novel, Ackroyd shares with poststructuralists the questioning of history as monolithic. Chatterton disrupts the chronological order of narrating and history-writing. Instead, it offers three different historical periods. Chatterton expresses the view of fictionality of history and reality. In an interview, Ackroyd claims that for him fiction and biography “are just writing, as I have said before” (1996, 213). Of blurring the boundaries between biography and fiction he adds that “I don’t think they are different genres. So the hesitancy isn’t really there. Maybe they are for the reader, but for me they are not” (1996, 213). This indicates Ackroyd’s questioning view of the separation of a literary work from other works including history which is best reflected in Chatterton. It also points out his absorption of poststructuralists’ questioning the view of history as monolithic. Another significant feature of Chatterton is blurring the boundary between forgery and innovation. Most of his works including Chatterton are fraught with lines and allusions to precursor writers. This can indicate that he is a follower of the Tradition, to use Eliot’s term, that is, the familiarity of a writer with the whole bulk of literary theory and writing as well as the current modes of writing. This aspect makes his works

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sophisticated, for it requires a vast knowledge in the realm of literature and theory on the part of the reader. Of his own style Ackroyd comments “[s]o I presume my interest in lifting or adopting various styles, various traces, various languages, is part of my imaginative trend, and I suppose the use of historical fact as well as other people’s writings is just an aspect of this magpie-like quality” (1996, 213). This “magpie-like quality” and imitation of other styles are best expressed in Chatterton. Moreover, his works are obsessed with a critical view of historical truth. To problematise the notion, he blends the historical with the fictive. For him, truth is what we make up, an idea also expressed in Chatterton. All of these aspects identify Ackroyd and Chatterton known as an essential postmodernist writer and novel respectively. Generally, Chatterton is a parody of an historical text and historiography in general. In other words, it is a return, not nostalgic but critical, to the past, be it of an historical event or of literary texts. As a parody Chatterton uses, abuses and lays bare the style and conventions of historiography. It is a parody, for “the work of art is itself a reordering of other works of art from the past. . . . Texts are rearrangements of other texts”  (Finney 1992, 250). Recalling White’s idea of “emplotment,” Ackroyd’s rearrangement of the material is very crucial to the problematisation of representation. Postmodernist metafiction is highly aware of the referent. As the novel reveals, problems arise when the text tries to make references to historical events or what we may know as the external reality. The subject matter and narrative strategies and techniques are employed to self-reflexively manifest the problematisation, which is of representation and referentiality postulated as an axiom in historiography. Representation first and foremost functions through similarity. Nonetheless, in Hutcheon’s words, “[r]eference is not correspondence, after all” (1988, 144). On the other hand, whilst many, including modernists, reject the possibility of reality, metafictionists, including Ackroyd, do confirm its existence. They assert reality is a construct, that is, not given to us, not there. Besides, whereas modernists’ return is nostalgic, mourning the loss of something, that of metafictionists’ is critical, whether they are returning to the past historical events or to other writers’ texts and themes. They aim at neither rejection nor attestation but problematisation. “Historiographic metafiction,” as Hutcheon contends, “renders problematic both the denial

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and the assertion of reference” (1988, 145). Consequently, this section endeavors to manifest the ways Chatterton explores history to put the idea of representation and referentiality in a crisis. In addition, it demonstrates and takes into account how the structure of the novel as well as its subject matter reflects each other in problematising the representation of reality. As the name of the novel Chatterton suggests, it is an historical investigation and interrogation of real Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenthcentury poet and writer. At first glance, this suggests the whole novel as a book of history or an historical novel. It is set in three different historical eras: the twentieth century with Charles’s haphazard encounter with a painting said to have been representing Thomas Chatterton; the nineteenth century in which a painter, Wallis, is using a poet called George Meredith as a model to paint the portrait of the last moment of Thomas Chatterton’s suicide; finally, the eighteenth century and the last moment of Thomas Chatterton’s life. Ackroyd establishes the theme of historical exploration by Charles’s investigation of the portrait which the seller attributes to Chatterton’s suicide scene. Inspired by the curiosity over the portrait, Charles sets out to see the real owner from whom he receives a set of documents and a manuscript with the initials “T. C” and a confession of Chatterton having faked his own death continuing to write under famous names including William Bake. Towards the end of the novel, the manuscripts and the confession turn out to be fakes. Resorting to an historical event which is generally regarded as a suicide, Ackroyd confirms the reader’s previous expectation and interpretation of the event, that is, Chatterton’s committing suicide. He, as well as Charles, imitates the act of historiography in using the available documents and interpreting them to arrive at a final truth. Being “engaged in an act of research,” (Ackroyd 1993, 9) Charles, in the vein of a historiographer, starts writing about Thomas Chatterton based upon the findings. He investigates this through “Chatterton’s books” (1993, 14). Here Ackroyd uses historical evidence to plant the seeds of incredulity in the reader by suggesting that “Chatterton didn’t die” but continued to write “fake” medieval poems (1993, 14). Nonetheless, taking distance from mere copying and arriving at a conclusion, Ackroyd jeopardises the situation by revealing the manuscripts as fabrications to reveal how a historiographer makes truth or reality. Their referentiality to the external reality is highly questioned. Throughout the

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novel, references are made to the external reality ranging from Chatterton’s life, the place where he lived, detailed information of his surroundings and activities during his lifetime, his faking the Rowley poems, his status as a man of genius highly esteemed by Romantic poets and the list could go on. Nonetheless, the novel suggests that such referentiality remains problematic so far as it is challenged and questioned, not in a sense that the reality did not exist but that it is a construct, granted a meaning. It is questioned and challenged in different ways, from the events and incidents in the story to the juxtaposition of the real with the fictive to the symbolic use of the setting. After referentiality and references to the real world are established, the novel questions their possibility by self-reflexive comments, however esoteric, given by the characters. For instance, Harriet, asking Charles for help, says, “I can’t put them together. I have all the names and dates. I have my notes and my diaries. But I can’t . . . ‘Interpret them’” (1993, 25). This is exactly the situation we have in the novel: we cannot arrive at a final interpretation. The idea of history-writing and imitation-with-distortion of history is extended and emphasised throughout the narrative at the level of both structure and subject matter. Chatterton in the autobiography given in the narrative says, I read heraldry, English antiquities, metaphysical disquisitions, mathematicall researches, music, astronomy, physic and the like. But nothing enthralled me so much as Historicall works, and indeed I could not learn so much at Colston’s as I could at home. (Ackroyd 1993, 51)

This passage reveals Chatterton is a good reader of the past as well as a good forger. Charles is also depicted as a good forger. Meredith fakes the portrait of Chatterton. This self-reflexively suggests that the novel is a parody of the historical novel, imitating it in terms of subject matter and form whilst taking distance from it. In effect, by taking the idea of the possibility of representation as its theme, the novel plays the subject matter and the form off against each other. After establishing a generally known and accepted (totalised) version of Chatterton’s life, Ackroyd, as a narrative strategy, has extended and sustained the idea of historical investigation and exploration throughout

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the narrative. Moreover, the subject matter contributes to the idea of historical investigation by explicitly exploring the story of an historical figure, Thomas Chatterton, indicated in the title. Biographical account of Chatterton at the beginning of the novel as the prologue before starting the story is Ackroyd’s attempt in using historical documents as the background of the novel. This use of paratextuality both establishes and draws upon historiographic conventions. When combined with a fictive story of Chatterton fabricated by the writer, it, nevertheless, shatters the established illusion. As the narrator says, “Harriet knew that Sarah had been engaged on this project, a study of the images of death in English painting and provisionally entitled The Art of Death, for the last six years and still seemed to be no nearer completing it” (Ackroyd 1993, 20). This study, however, remains incomplete. This is the study of the dead, that is, the past reflected in a work of art, be it literary or historical. Furthermore, this “past” is called upon through the use of the paratext. The text asserts both the possibility of representation by directly alluding to the real information of Chatterton’s life and auto-referentiality, for “we only know that external reference through other texts” (Hutcheon 1986, 310), hence, auto-referential. Moreover, such interrogation of the past is also shown in Philip’s attempt to circumstantiate the portrait and the documents’ authenticity and originality by leafing through historical and biographical books to learn more about Chatterton. Ackroyd has accordingly extended the motif of historical investigation to explore issues that are of high significance in all areas including that of historical objectivity, authenticity and coherence and to suggest the past is still a living force always open to new readings and interpretations. As Chatterton says in his seemingly autobiography, “‘I will perform a Miracle. . . . I will bring the Past to light again’” (Ackroyd 1993, 51). This is a self-reflexive comment upon the way historiographers, as well as Ackroyd in this novel, do. It reflects what Hutcheon says of this mode of fiction, “a dialogue with the past in the light of the present” (1988 19). The sentence is, indeed, a laying bare of the device. This also manifests in and supported by Stewart Merk’s analysing the portrait to authenticate it. The same idea is expressed by Meredith who addresses Wallis “‘[y]ou are a Resurrectionist, Henry. You can bring the dead to life, I see’” (Ackroyd 1993, 97). This suggests all novelists (especially metafictionists) and artists in general as well as historiographers are resurrectionists, for they bring the

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past to the present giving it a living presence and force. This implies that reading is dynamic and active, not static and passive as in literary realism. Moreover, it is what a postmodernist parodist does. Ackroyd cunningly and deliberately has extended the idea by now and again referring to Eliot’s The Waste Land such as “she says, bury yourself in the garden and don’t bother to come up in the spring” (Ackroyd 1993, 94) and “April with his showers sweet” (1993, 94). This too reveals postmodernist art’s constant dialogue with the past. This return, unlike that of modernists, is problematising. It also questions the avant-garde’s radical breaking away from the past. It, consequently, challenges the avant-garde’s anti-representationality. The idea of re-writing and returning to the past is also evident when Philip enters to find books for more information about Chatterton. He undertakes to recover the past, “since he suspected that in old books some forgotten truth might be recovered . . .” (Ackroyd 1993, 42 emphasis added). However, history is irrecoverable. He “knew that his real comfort was to be found in books” (Ackroyd 1993, 42). Nevertheless, nobody can find their comfort–arriving at a final coherent meaning–in historical books, since they are confusing. They put the reader in more dazzlement concerning the truth. Additionally, as a literary narrative technique Ackroyd continues to extend the idea by making allusions to Eliot’s The Waste Land as discussed earlier for the theme of rebirth of the dead. Therefore, the idea of the text as an historical book is established and sustained both at the level of subject matter and structure to be destabilised. This reveals the writer’s similarity to historiographers, for both make use of paratextual convention, refer to historical documents, re-arrange them and put them into writing, that is, narrative. Ackroyd must have referred to the historical information about Chatterton to establish the first version of reality about his life in the prologue: Chatterton committed suicide. This is the historical information agreed upon and accepted as an axiom throughout history. However, as a parody of historiography in general, the novel parodically both imitates and takes distance from such conventions to shed light upon the idea that history is fictional. As Hutcheon puts it, historiographic metafictionists employ “paratextual conventions” to take vengeance “for the historian’s tendency to read literature as only historical documents” (1986, 303). Therefore, the narrative’s taking distance from an historical text is evident in its violation of the historical information offered in the prologue.

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What Ackroyd, as well as other historiographic metafictionists, aims at is to explicate to the reader the ways–the narrative strategies and techniques–through which we construct history and in so doing, thus, the reader’s hope of arriving at a determinate meaning and ending remains unfulfilled. Above and beyond, historiographers use different documents and by intermingling them give the whole narrative especial meaning and accordingly make another version of history as practiced by Charles: The sad pilgrimage of his life . . .” Charles stopped, uncertain how to continue with the preface. He could not now remember whether all this information came from the documents themselves, or from the biographies which Philip had lent him. [. . .] He felt that he knew the biographers well, but that he still understood very little about Chatterton. At first Charles had been annoyed by these discrepancies but then he was exhilarated by them: for it meant that anything became possible. If there were no truths, everything was true. (Ackroyd, 79 emphasis added)

As shown here, the past cannot be recovered, only constructed. Ackroyd is unearthing how self-contradictory and multiple history-writing is. Charles’s note is also a self-reflexive comment upon the method and strategy employed in the novel which is self-contradictory and uncertain. His exhilaration caused by the discrepancies and contradictions are close to metafictionists’ same concern. Unlike historiographers and realists, they, including Ackroyd, take pleasure in such contradictions and uncertainties. This is a wonderful example of a theory-in-practice novel as mentioned earlier. It is postmodern theories in artistic practice at the level of both structure and subject matter. Charles confusion continues: “Charles went back to his preface but, when he read ‘The sad pilgrimage of his life’, he stared at the words with incomprehension. Where had they come from?” (Ackroyd 1993, 79). “Incomprehension,” for he is not sure of his own writing. On the other hand, he is attaching a special meaning to Chatterton’s life: “sad.” However, was it really sad? If so, can it still remain objective? Charles is uncertain and puzzled. Indeed, what Charles does here is a critical imitation of what historiographers do. He is bringing the past to life. However, as this section implies, studying the past from the present

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problematises the authenticity of history and historical representation, for no objective, certain and single version of history could be accessible. Therefore, the narrative is aimed at demystifying the idea of a unified, coherent and objective history as opposed to the mimetic view. As Philip observes: [I]t was best to let the manuscripts be, to leave them as they were at the time of Charles’s death and make no further effort to prove or to disprove their authenticity. Had he not always said to Philip that there is a charm and even a beauty in unfinished work–the face which is broken by the sculptor and then abandoned, the poem which is interrupted and never ended? Why should historical research not also remain incomplete, existing as a possibility and not fading into knowledge? (Ackroyd 1993, 134)

Proving and disproving an historical fact requires our certainty of it. It also entails exclusion which is highly questioned in postmodernism. Philip’s point is that any claim concerning the authenticity and inauthenticity of history–representationality and anti-representationality–in the sense that one ultimate meaning is possible is a fallacy. Instead, the novel makes attempts to problematise, re-presents but not represent. In addition, Philip’s point is why you want to superimpose meaning upon any event. This is a self-reflexive comment upon both historiography and literature in the sense that any attempt in arriving at a final meaning in a narrative is ideological and fallacious. It exposes Ackroyd’s own strategy in the novel. That is, the novel is interspersed with different narratives, voices and meanings so that it remains unfinished. This is not a characteristic peculiar to metafiction. However, it is laid bare in it. Moreover, Philip realises that, as the narrator says, “[i]f you trace anything backwards, trying to figure out cause and effect, or motive, or meaning, there is no real origin for anything. Everything just exists. Everything just exists in order to exist” (Ackroyd 1993, 146). In view of that, an historical event exists as just an event, not a reality or fact; we give it meaning. As is implied by Philip, history is a human construct, consequently, a creation, an artefact. Creation demands subjectivity. The two notions have often been overlooked in historiography in large part. They question liberal humanism’s objectivity. Furthermore, metafictionists assert that history is not a coherent, monolithic, cause-andeffect chronology. Consequently, any attempt to postulate history as a

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coherent unified entity is tantamount to superimposing especial meaning upon it. It is also an ideological act. As Andrew Flint has already apprehended, “[t]he years are incorrigible, aren’t they? They never cease” (Ackroyd 1993, 46). Therefore, as the self-reflexive comment has it, history cannot be recovered objectively, for it is not a fixed monolithic narrative but is constantly present and our understanding of it is always conditioned. It can only be created. Historical representation accordingly requires creation and interpretation, not an objective recounting. The idea of historical investigation and bringing the past to life is also extended by symbolism. Ackroyd seems to be singular in being very comprehensive and selective in that he conveys the problematisation of representation and draws the reader’s attention to the idea by differently laying bare his own devices at the level of structure as well as subject matter. Amongst his strategies is the symbolic use of the setting to raise more selfreflexivity to be recognised only by the sophisticated reader. Bearing in mind that understanding metafiction requires a good grasp of knowledge in the realm of literary theory, this in turn suggests the esoteric aspect of metafiction. As a case in point, entering the Dodd’s Gardens, Charles beholds “the pilasters copied from eighteenth century facades and reproduced in miniature; the small iron balconies, some of them newly painted and others stippled with rust . . .” (Ackroyd 1993, 4 emphasis added). Analogous to the autobiography section, this is a self-reflexive comment and theoretical issue expressed in an artistic way, by contrast symbolically. Ackroyd seems to have repurposed postmodern theories into artistic practice as is metafictionists’ wont. That is, he is deeply concerned with postmodern theories. The setting, the description of the architecture can symbolically stand for the juxtaposition of the historical with the fictive as in parody in which the ideas of both copy and innovation simultaneously exist. The new and the old are juxtaposed as in postmodernist architectures: “the pediments so broken or decayed that they were scarcely recognisable above the doors and windows” (Ackroyd 1993, 4 emphasis added). Just as the architecture suggests they are similar to the original, however dissimilar in that they have missed some parts as in parody, as in this novel. His use of architecture may deliberately be due to the fact that it was first in architecture where postmodernist hybridity took artistic shape and to which the term “postmodern” was first applied (Hutcheon 1988, xi). This once

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more shows Ackroyd’s grasp of theoretical knowledge that the text expects of the reader. The past did exist, as the novel suggests, yet our recognition and knowledge of it is problematic. The narrative goes on to say “the curiously moulded fanlights discoloured with age, so that no light could now pass through them; the elaborate stucco work, none of it now without blemish or injury; the wood rotten, and the stone fractured or defaced” (Ackroyd 1993, 4 emphasis added). Nothing has remained untouched. Everything has been removed from its “original” status, if any at all. Furthermore, this association of light with knowledge and understanding is put into question. As it symbolically suggests, we are not able to have full knowledge of the past as time passes, for our accessibility to it is only through narrations which are, akin to the novel, constructed through different techniques, therefore, the problematisation of the representation of reality. The past can be re-written but in a twisted, deformed, disfigured way. In addition, in Chapter Two we have the juxtaposition of three different levels of time in the description of Harriet’s house which is of great significance: “. . . the Sony television set, the copy of Johnson’s Dictionary which was used as a base for the death mask of John Keats reproduced in a limited edition” (Ackroyd 1993, 15). The television set belongs to the present time. Johnson belongs to the eighteenth century. Keats belongs to the beginning of the nineteenth century. All are juxtaposed. This symbolises the juxtaposition of the three different levels of time we have in the novel. This is also another self-reflexive–however esoteric–indication of mingling the real with the fictive in that references to the real world and history are intermingled with fictive characters such as Harriet. Thus, the style reflects the subject matter. Therefore, as previously mentioned, Ackroyd makes use of symbols as a strategy to underpin the problematisation of representation and referentiality expressed throughout the novel. Similarly, exposing his method of writing Chatterton says, “[t]he very words had been called forth from me, with as much Ease as if I were writing in the Language of my own Age. Schoolboy tho’ I was, it was even at this time that I decided to shore up these ancient Fragments with my own Genius: thus the Living and the Dead were to be reunited. From that very moment, I ceased to be a meer Boy” (Ackroyd 1993, 52 emphasis added). As one of the most illuminating cases of parody and self-reflexivity through which the subject and the

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structure echo each other to problematise the representation of reality, this self-reflexively demystifies how writers imitate the language of the past so that the reader might think it original. It is the language of Ackroyd, parodying “the dead,” that is, Eliot which the reader might attribute to Chatterton. This anachronistic use of a part of Eliot’s poem in Chatterton’s writing creates self-reflexivity and undermines the authenticity of Chatterton’s words. This is one of the most illuminating examples of parody imparting the artistic ways through which a historiographer may create history. Ackroyd both imitates Chatterton’s writing whilst taking distance from it by deliberate use of anachronism as a technique. In so doing the past and the present are reunited. Accordingly, the narrative imitates the past– Eliot’s poem as a case in point–to use the very theme of rebirth expressed in the poem, hence, representationality. However, it simultaneously takes distance from it through anachronistic use of a part of Eliot’s poem in Chatterton’s writing which creates self-reflexivity and undermines the authenticity of Chatterton’s words and consequently represents autorepresentationality in the work of art. Nonetheless, the allusion made to The Waste Land intensifies the theme of rebirth of the dead and return to the past. In addition to exposing the strategies employed in historiography, Ackroyd is in this light manifesting his own strategy and style in the novel. On the one hand, he is doing what Chatterton is preaching in that he is parodying The Waste Land as a modern work of art intermingling it with the style and vocabulary of Chatterton’s time. This is a copy of Chatterton’s style of writing to make this part completely regarded as his autobiography with critical distanciation which is brought about by alluding to the said poem. Therefore, Ackroyd means what Chatterton says whilst criticising the very thing. Thus, the living and the dead are re-united not to be passively digested but to be criticised and challenged. In effect, Ackroyd is concurrently using and abusing the past and the present. He does so by revealing the style in which he writes. Chatterton’s autobiographical account of his writing and style is a self-reflexive manifestation of Ackroyd’s, as well as realists and historians’, style and strategies of writing. His allusion to a line in The Waste Land is both imitating the very idea–that the past and the present are re-united–and taking distance from it, for whereas Eliot’s is nostalgic mourning for a loss, Ackroyd’s is problematising. As mentioned

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before, parody may aim at a whole discourse. In other words, Eliot’s poem, or a part of it, may be used to criticise not the poem but a discourse–that of realism and liberal humanism. To use Hutcheon’s words, “parody’s ‘target’ text is always another work of art or, more generally, another form of coded discourse (1985, 16). Indeed, it may use hypotext (the parodied text) as a target, as in the traditional application of parody, or as a weapon, as in the modern use, to criticise not the parodied text but a whole convention or discourse in the present situation. The allusion to Eliot’s poem questions by suggesting that we know the past through the present and through our representations of the past. Consequently, history is not a unified, universal, coherent phenomenon as liberal humanists hold but is constructed through our representations. Furthermore, alluding to literature within an historical autobiographical text undermines historiography’s truth claims. This suggests the fictionality and literariness of historiography: we may find as much literature and fictiveness and reality–allusion to the external reality– in an historical text as we may in fictive texts such as Chatterton. Therefore, it is a story of writing a story or history. This amount of self-reflexivity suggests that the novel is fictive. For instance, the allusion to the poem also makes the readers aware that what they are reading is written by Ackroyd, not by the real Thomas Chatterton. This suggests that the work is antirepresentational, self-engaged and narcissistic to use Hutcheon’s terminology. On the other hand, Chatterton’s real accounts and references to his life and career as well as references to Eliot are possible historical references which cannot be analysed without considering the historical context and characters outside the present text. This, accordingly, proposes historiographic metafiction’s representationality, hence, postmodernist re-presentation and the problematisation of the representation of reality. It is neither a total break from the past, nor a mere copy of it. It is both referential and anti-referential. This is also a good example of blurring the boundary between the fictive and the real both in the sense that Chatterton’s account is fictive written by Ackroyd and that Chatterton’s real account is interpolated by a fictive part from fiction, that is, The Waste Land. These are all achieved due to Ackroyd’s style of parody. This self-reflexively lays bare Ackroyd’s method and strategies of writing the novel. This self-reflectivity, accordingly, problematises the novel’s possible referentiality. In the next section I

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explore how historical representationality is problematised by placing different versions of a single event under erasure.

History under Erasure “My syllables, the remnants of antiquity.” (Ackroyd 1993, 136)

Chatterton places history under erasure by presenting three different contradictory versions of a single event, Chatterton’s death, all of which make references to the external reality (Chatterton’s real life and death) to problematise the nature of historical originality and its possible representationality. The first version, generally accepted and presented in the prologue, predicates Chatterton committed suicide. Consequently, the reader is invited to participate in the act of historical investigation. The version is sustained and supported throughout the narrative until it is questioned by other possible versions. As presented in the prologue and reiterated at times throughout the narrative, his suicide is due to destitution and despair. This is made plausible and credible, for other references to Chatterton’s real life seem to be authentic including the information about his love of antiquity, the place he lived and his love of music due to his father’s profession. The version is supported by Meredith and Charles’s despair and poor life. Meredith decides to commit suicide for the same reason Chatterton did although the former does not go through it. Moreover, Harriet and Chatterton’s allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” intensifies the idea that he committed suicide due to “despondency and madness” (Ackroyd 1993, 2, 21, 147) which are in turn due to poverty. Consequently, the idea that Chatterton committed suicide is extended and can be confirmed by the novel’s strategy of giving real biographical information and its juxtaposition with the fictive, that is, the imaginary stories constituting Meredith and Charles being in parallel with that of Chatterton. After the use of paratext has established such seemingly possible referentiality, real historical information and allusion to Eliot’s poem, the narrative puts it under question by offering a second possible version of Chatterton’s death being in total contradiction with the first: Chatterton faked his own death. In Chapter Six, Chatterton undertakes to give an autobiographical account. In addition, to make it more plausible the

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narrator, Chatterton, seems to try to convince the reader to accept the information as real, for as he says, “who was present at my Birth but my own self” (Ackroyd 1993, 50). This version challenges the idea of poverty and despair and consequently suicide. Chatterton says, “[t]hey also called me Tom-all-Alone because of my solitariness: but I was not alone, since I had as many Companions as I required in my Books” (50-1). This implies a rejection of depression due to solitariness. It questions the idea of his hopelessness and despair given at the beginning. Being a good reader of the past and having read Chaucer, Camden, Percy and Cooper (51), Chatterton was very enthusiastically involved in the act of reading to the extent that he was not distracted. This intensifies the idea that he did not commit suicide but managed to write under pseudo-names. Chatterton continues to present the reasons and motivation behind what he did, that is, faking his death. As we are told, he was not able to write in his own name. His artistic productions “would have been despised and neglected” due to the people’s low intellect at the time and his being “a boy of obscure Birth” (53), thus, enough motivation for faking his own death. Chatterton divulges to his reader the methods and strategies by which he faked Rowley and continued to write under famous names. This accordingly vindicates and gives credence to his fabricated death. First, we are presented and made acquainted with the idea that Chatterton is a good reader of the past and a lover of antiquity. In this section the idea reverberates once more. As we are told in the prologue, “‘he fell in love,’ his mother said, both with antiquity and with the past of Bristol itself” (1). This section, accordingly, imitates and draws upon Chatterton’s generally known (totalised) biographical information presented in the prologue.  He would read scraps of parchment in the church where his father was a chorister. This adapts to the biographical information provided in the prologue concerning “certain scraps of manuscript,” his mother gave to him, “which had been found in the muniment room of that church” (1). In Chapter Six he says, “when I wrote out their words, copying the very spelling of the Originals, it was as if I had become one of those Dead and could speak with them also” (52). This reflects the prologue where we are told that he created “an authentic medieval style from a unique conflation of his reading and his own invention” (1). Therefore, the autobiography does refer to the external reality: he is a forger, a reader of the past and a

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lover of antiquity due to the situation in which he grew up. Moreover, Chatterton’s words self-reflexively suggest the novel as a dialogue with the past. This is a postmodernist idea and a comment upon Ackroyd’s style and theme. Charles is also a lover of antiquity expressed in his love of the portrait and investigation of the documents, the portrait and Chatterton himself, just like Ackroyd is. Therefore, Ackroyd sustains the idea. This section of the novel extends the idea of forgery as confessed by Chatterton in the real biographical information to his own death because of the reasons offered earlier. Just as he was a good forger, or a good imitator in a sense, so he could fake his own death. The idea is also supported by Joynson’s persuasion concerning Chatterton’s devising his death by elaborating upon the ways through which he faked the ancient poetry. Chatterton’s account of what he did gives feasibility and credibility to the idea of faking his death, an idea occurring to Joynson: “what could be easier than to prove he had faked everything else, including his own death?” (139). Chatterton confesses and exposes that “[m]y first task was to give myself as good a Lineage as any Gentleman in Bristol, and this I did by combining my own knowledge of Heraldic devices with a document which, as I put it, was ‘just newly found in St Mary Redcliffe and writ in the language of auntient Dayes’” (52). He is very self-reflexively talking about his own style. He continues to lay bare his style and strategies as is evident in the words “[m]y method was as follows” (52). He explains how he uses books and volumes and then adds his readings of antiquity to them: If I took a passage from each, be it ever so short, I found that in Unison they became quite a new Account and, as it were, Chatterton’s Account. Then I introduc’d my own speculations in physic, drama, and philosophy, all of them cunningly changed by the ancient Hand and Spelling I had learn’d; but conceeved by me with such Intensity that they became more real than the Age in which I walked. I reproduc’d the Past and filled it with such Details that it was as if I were observing it in front of me: so the Language of ancient Dayes awoke the Reality itself for, tho’ I knew that it was I who composed these Histories, I knew also that they were true ones. (52 emphasis added)

Then, he explains more: “[a]nd these I related in their own Voices, naturally, as if they were authentick Histories: so that tho’ I was young Thomas

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Chatterton to those I met, I was a very Proteus to those who read my Works” (54). However, the conflation of the historical and the fictive, in the form of an autobiography, calls into question the authenticity of historical accounts, including this one and their referentiality. In Hutcheon’s terms, “[t]he interaction of the historiographic and the metafictional foregrounds the rejection of the claims of both ‘authentic’ representation and ‘inauthentic’ copy alike, and the very meaning of artistic originality is as forcefully challenged as is the transparency of historical referentiality” (1995, 77), hence, problematisation of representation. Moreover, this is a self-reflexive manifestation of historians’ style of writing. It reveals how language and narrative strategies can give meaning to a phenomenon. Chatterton goes into every detail of his own method. Therefore, as he says: [T]o confound and to outwit them [readers], I learned how to give my own Papers the semblance of Antiquity. Into my Closet I smuggl’d a pounce bag of Charcole, a great stick of yellow ochre and a bottle of black lead powder, with which Materials I could fabricate an appearance of great Age as closely as if my new invented Papers were the very ones from the Chests of St Mary Redcliffe. I would rub the ochre and lead across the Parchments and sometimes, to antiquate my Writings still further, I would drag them through the Dust or hold them above a Candle–which process not only quite chang’d the colour of the Inke but blackened and contracted the Parchment itself. (Ackroyd 1993, 52)

As explained, he did not merely copy the past but added his own material to it. This is self-reflexively a manifestation of Ackroyd’s method and strategy of writing as well as that of other metafictionists’ to a lesser or more degree. The use of “Dayes” highly self-reflexively reveals how he uses old language. Just as Chatterton is explaining his methods, so does Ackroyd. Therefore, the reality and representationality that we may postulate for a text is the result of strategies and techniques deliberately used by the writer such as “auntient” words. Old spellings–“authentick” and “auntient,” to name but two–and allusions to the bulk of literature including The Waste Land enable Ackroyd to exhume the past. Chatterton’s confession echoes– represents–Ackroyd’s own style and Ackroyd’s in turn re-presents

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historiography. In other words, he problematises historiography’s referentiality. He has brought the historical into the fictive. In the same vein, the reader is apt to consider the part as the real account of Chatterton. Since Chatterton was a forger of genius, the reader may easily accept his other forgery supported by Joynson’s persuasion: suicide. Joynson tells him “‘[t]he monk cannot last. You are riding him too hard’” (55). Chatterton thinks that “[h]e was Correct: there was no point in further Masquerade and, with Catastrophe threatening, I could no longer restrain myself. ‘But I must write,’ I said, ‘I need to live. I cannot eat air or grass for my Sustenance’” (55). Joynson suggests that Chatterton fake his own death. As mentioned earlier, Chatterton’s motivation for faking his death is exactly due to the same reasons offered earlier for his suicide: poverty. We can see how cunningly and artistically Ackroyd makes two contradictory interpretations and meanings out of a single event. Chatterton faked his own death in the same way that he forged medieval poems to continue to write under pseudonames including Rowley, as presented in the documents and confession attributed to him as well as in Chapter Six which is totally narrated by Chatterton himself. The idea–Chatterton faked his own death–is made feasible, for it is extended throughout the novel: Charles is asked to fake Harriet, Wallis fakes Chatterton, the portraits of the three nudes are fakes and the painting Charles comes to possess turns out to be a fake too. In this sense, they all echo and mirror each other. Ackroyd has employed the technique of mise en abyme. Each story operates as a mise en abyme of the novel itself. Ackroyd has written a section in the novel which is presented as Chatterton’s autobiography but in reality has been written by Joynson. In effect, the idea that the autobiography attributed to Chatterton is in fact written by Joynson reflects Ackroyd’s own style. In other words, the whole novel is Ackroyd’s artistic creation, not reality. On the one hand, the idea that the confession is a fake is convincing due to its dominance, sustainment and extension throughout the novel in different ways. On the other, the narrative avoids from passively accepting it due to the text’s highly selfreflexivity and laying bare the methods and strategies including the very technique of mise en abyme. Here, the reader has totally, but confusedly, accepted that Chatterton was a forger. Confusedly, since this is Ackroyd’s account of him and is self-engaged. Hence, fictive whilst historical facts

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offering referentiality cannot easily be disregarded. The reader can go to historical books for Chatterton’s life and history. It seems here that we have the same historical account as stated in historical books. However, its juxtaposition with fictive characters and parts gives the account a new meaning. The same event now does not have the same meaning. Every sophisticated reader knows that Chatterton’s real life is depicted in this chapter. Nonetheless, Ackroyd’s strategies have given it new meanings but self-consciously. It is first in the form of autobiography. Parodying autobiography as a subdivision of historiography, this section highly challenges and questions the credibility and authenticity we usually attribute to historical documents including autobiography. To convince the reader, Ackroyd’s strategy is to fill the story with some historical validity whilst making it invalid by subverting it. How the writer has managed to combine the fictive with some historical validity is both illuminating and artistic. References to Chatterton’s life, the document his mother had given to him and his knowledge of the ancient are all valid and difficult to deny. Yet, they are manipulated in the narrative to give a new meaning to Chatterton’s death: he faked his death. This possible referentiality is problematised when the confession turns out to be a faked narrative. The reader is called upon to acknowledge how artistically the writer presents postmodern theories in practice at the level of subject matter and structure. Therefore, not only the idea established at the beginning is subverted at the level of structure by providing different narratives and voices, but at the level of subject matter as reflected in Chatterton’s confession and in Merk’s manifestation of the techniques employed in the portrait. Self-contradictorily as it may seem, the manuscripts, although faked by Joynson, undermine other versions of reality in the novel, for the very act of forgery may be true for them too. Reasons and motivation presented here accord with the ones of the external reality: he would have been neglected due to the people’s indifference and lack of intellect for art. Nonetheless, Ackroyd’s self-reflexive strategy of exposing the device as reflected in Chatterton’s divulging his method of writing and forging casts doubt upon the version presented here. Furthermore, the autobiography as well as the documents turn out to be fakes. In effect, Ackroyd’s strategy is to put the whole section under erasure.

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However, the introduction of a third possible version of Chatterton’s death adds to the confusion aroused so far. It turns out that the documents, the portrait and Chatterton’s autobiography have been fabricated due to personal interests. Therefore, as Charles says, although before the revelation, “our whole understanding of eighteenth-century poetry will have to be revised” (Ackroyd 1993, 79). This is a key concept not only throughout the novel but also for almost all historiographic metafictionists, for as Charles realises and writes “each biography described a quite different poet: even the simplest observation by one was contradicted by another, so that nothing seemed certain” (79). The novel is accordingly questioning the totalised generally agreed idea of historiography that has insinuated itself into our consciousness. In order to tarnish Chatterton’s name, Joynson decides to fake the manuscript. This is redolent of the ideological ground of all narratives and the idea that narratives–be they of historical or literary– are human constructs. We have a return to the first version–that Chatterton committed suicide–but this time with a distortion, for this new revelation concerns Joynson’s personal motivation. He decides to take vengeance upon Chatterton by forging the “memoirs” and faking “the work of a faker and so confuse forever the memory of Chatterton” (139). As revealed here, the postmodernist re-turn to the past is shown at the level of structure and plot as well as subject matter in that many times the narrative re-turns and refers to Chatterton’s death to provide it with a new meaning. Moreover, selfreflexive comments in the narrative point out postmodernist re-turn to the past. In a sense, this is what historiographers do and what Ackroyd has selfreflexively and consciously done. This brings home to the reader the idea that beneath any narrative lurks an ideology and that historians and historiographers may give especial meaning to an event for the very reason: personal interests and/or ideological reasons. In addition, the presentation of three different levels of time suggests the text as fiction. The historical accounts give the real impression of reading history. It also suggests the idea of re-writing the past whose objective possibility is problematised in the course of the novel not in the sense that one cannot re-write history but in the sense that no single unified account of the past can be recovered. For, writers may discriminately make the story agree with their especial interests or ideologies. Harriet distorts Wordsworth’s lines that “‘[c]ut is the bough . . . that might have grown full

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straight’” (2) to accord it with her personal interest and purpose. Ackroyd has managed “to show from the start of his book that we all appropriate the past for our own purposes and in our own ways” (Finney 1992, 250). He has done so both at the level of structure through fabrication of different narratives and their juxtaposition and at the level of subject matter by selfreflexive discussions of art and literature in three different times. For that reason, distortions and the way materials are arranged–emplotment– contribute to the (ideological) purpose behind re-writing history. After Charles’s death, Harriet takes the painting and the documents to a gallery where it is dated back to 1830 due to a piece of furniture depicted in the painting with the same date. Further, Philip finds out that the manuscripts are also fakes. The owner says the story of Chatterton’s faked suicide was fabricated by his ancestor, Samuel Joynson. Joynson’s son paints the supposed portrait of Chatterton as a continuation of his father’s hoax. His father did so (blackening Chatterton’s name) in revenge for slanders against the publisher expressed in Chatterton’s last letter. Therefore, the subject matter here, which is totally fabricated, supports and reflects the idea that distortions and other versions of reality may be devised due to ideological reasons and/or personal interests. The novel accordingly suggests the possibility of ideological background of any historical as well as literary text. In other words, it exposes the ideological nature of all representations. Moreover, the idea of the documents and confession as fakes is juxtaposed with the third version of Chatterton’s death: he unintentionally killed himself by accidently taking too much medicine to treat his venereal disease. It stands at odds with the generally known biography of Chatterton, however, in a different way. His intention and motivation for living is expressed in the letter to his mother: “I enjoy high spirits. I am elevated beyond expression, and have lofty thoughts of my approaching eminence. Soon you will see me on the pinnacle of glory, dear Mama, far removed from the prostrate and debased Bristolians of our acquaintance” (Ackroyd 1993, 120). He continues, “[d]earest Mama, my rise through life proceeds apace. I am exalted in London and will no doubt soon reach the pitch of sublimity. Your loving son, Tom” (120-1). The italicised terms imply that he is fraught with hope and incentive expecting a promising future. Italics are in original which are seemingly put by Chatterton in the letter. However, this is a strategy deliberately employed by Ackroyd to draw the reader’s

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attention so that the other version concerning his committing suicide sounds unconvincing and consequently incredible. By fabricating and presenting Chatterton’s intention in the form of a letter to his mother, Ackroyd establishes enough justification for the accidental death. In this part, if regarded as complete, the writer manipulated and discovered evidence mingling them with the imaginary which supports the idea that Chatterton died accidentally: the fact that he was a writer of genius as acclaimed by Romantic poets and was reaching his pinnacle of success–consequently, motivated–is true historical information. At the beginning and in a similar fashion, he uses another information and evidence that make his suicide credible. In so doing, Ackroyd is self-reflexively commenting upon the ways through which reality and meaning are constructed by a historiographer as well as a narrator. As a result, the entire three versions, which are in total contradiction with each other, are made plausible, supported and extended for a while to be contradicted by the other. This self-reflexively and selfconsciously reveals how a single event may be narrated in a way, thanks to the selection and arrangement of the material, to produce different contradictory meanings. Therefore, meaning is constructed and produced in the process of writing. As Hutcheon puts it, “[t]he real exists (and existed), but our understanding of it is always conditioned by discourses, by our different ways of talking about it” (1988, 157) each of which may emphasise a specific ideological aspect of it. In the final chapter, Ackroyd describes Chatterton according to his real biography and history: “underneath he writes, in capital letters, APOLLO REDIVIVUS. Then he tears it up and scatters the pieces on the wooden floor” (1993, 141). This chapter is a re-writing of the last minutes of Chatterton’s life. Once more, juxtaposition of the historical (the real) with the fictive which is Chatterton’s accidental death problematises its referentiality. Furthermore, even this part of the narrative is tinted with the idea of Chatterton committing suicide. Chatterton comments upon the child he sees: “[b]etter to give him arsenic . . . than to leave him undefended against this harsh world” (132-3). For that reason, he seems to be obsessed with suicide. As Mr. Crome conceives, he does not seem to be happy. This can give credence to the idea that he committed suicide. In effect, Ackroyd puts each narrative presented in the novel under erasure. We cannot naïvely accept it; nor can we eliminate it from the narrative. It is part of the narrative.

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However, he withdraws from it. Although it might not be real in an historical sense, it is real in that it contains a broad critical discussion of historywriting and production of art. The novel thus makes poses critical questions concerning the objectivity, coherence and transparency to offer history as an artefact, a creation, a discourse. This is made possible through incorporating the conventions of historiography whilst taking distance from it. As Hutcheon contends, “[h]istoriographic metafiction, while teasing us with the existence of the past as real, also suggests that there is no direct access to that real which would be unmediated by the structures of our various discourses about it” (1988, 146). Consequently, the referential possibility of the narrative is highly put under question through different techniques and strategies at the level of form and subject matter including the presentation of three contradictory versions of Chatterton’s death; juxtaposition of three different levels of time, a mixture of the real (historical information, events and characters) and the fictive; the symbolic use of the setting; selfreflexivity which highly challenges referentiality, as expressed in the comments and discussions bandied between and provided by the characters and the narrators; the use of mise en abyme; the technique of under erasure which is to the highest degree problematising and confusing; the investigation of and re-writing, the real life and death of Thomas Chatterton as the subject matter; the placement of theoretical discussions into artistic practice; the confrontation of the present with the past in the form of a dialogue; and more significantly the use of parody–imitation with distanciation. None of the strategies and techniques either reject or accept representation of reality, but re-present which implies both imitation and referentiality as well as difference and auto-referentiality. They aim at problematisation of representation so far as to assert our understanding of the past is through discourse constructed by us, not given to us. The ultimate takeaway for the reader may be perplexing, for, to appropriate C. H. Sisson’s lines, “[i]f things seem not to be as once they were / Perhaps they are as once they seemed to be” (1998, 376). Besides, history is not a coherent, monolithic, final reality. It does refer to a reality. However, this reality is a human construct. Hence, the arrangement or the emplotment of the material contributes to the problematisation of the representation of

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reality. In the next section, I explore the problematisation of representationality in literary realism in the novel with regard to narrative conventions.

The Problematisation of Representationality in Literary Realism with Regard to Narrative Conventions “I said that the words were real, Henry. I did not say that what they depicted was real.” (Ackroyd 1993, 98)

In historiographic metafiction, problematisation of representationality (or alternatively referentiality) is of great concern. Whereas literary realism endeavors to employ some conventions in order to foster the illusion of reality and therefore to establish representationality, postmodernist historiographic metafiction including Chatterton both draws upon and takes distance from the very conventions to problematise any representational view of art and literature. It re-presents–self-reflexively puts in a crisis–the possibility of representationality. As in literary realism, Chatterton establishes the mimetic view of literature and art. In so doing, it however challenges the very view. It, in effect, parodies the mimetic (representational) view of art. Whilst literary realism tries to establish the possibility of representationality and postulates art as representational, Chatterton constantly reminds the reader of the process of its own construction, hence, auto-referentiality. It, nonetheless, never abandons representationality. As Hutcheon observes, metafiction “paradoxically uses and abuses the conventions of both realism and modernism and does so in order to challenge their transparency, in order to prevent glossing over the contradictions that make the postmodern what it is: historical and metafictional, contextual and selfreflexive, ever aware of its status as discourse, as a human construct” (1988, 53). In the same vein, in what follows narrative strategies and techniques, concerning literary realism’s conventions, which lead to the problematisation of referentiality are discussed. Literary realism postulates the existence of the referent as external and real. In other words, the text objectively and impersonally refers to the external reality. Consequently, it conventionally regards the reader as passive. By contrast, historiographic metafiction, including Chatterton, exposes the fictionality of the referent. The text does refer to a referent (or a set of referents). Nevertheless, in effect, referentiality is constructed and

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created in the writing-reading process. As Hutcheon discusses, “it also creates a heterocosm through those words because the representation is of a fictive referent” (1980, 97). That is, in metafiction the text is not just a microcosm directly having access to and reflecting the macrocosm–the outside world and reality. It is a heterocosm whose referents are not external but fictive and created, not unreal. In other words, historiographic metafiction, including Chatterton, acknowledges its status as fictional at the level of subject matter and structure and in so doing creates an autonomous world. It, therefore, implies active participation of the reader. Having established itself as an historical text in the vein of literary realism–thus, suggesting referentiality–by dealing with the story of Chatterton, the text undermines its referentiality by distorting the very conventions through selfreflexivity and engagement with its own process of writing and construction. A note of caution should be made here: that the referent is fictive does not mean it is unreal, but that its reality is a construct, similar to the external reality. This status is produced mainly through the use of the techniques of mise en abyme, parallelism and self-reflexivity. Mise en abyme plays a central role in the novel. The technique is highly self-reflexive and creates auto-referentiality to a large extent. Process of artistic creation presented in the three stories (Charles’s, WallisMeredith’s and Chatterton’s) is a mise en abyme of the novel’s act of creation. Each story within the novel echoes the two others and the novel itself as a whole. As a case in point, Chatterton’s reveal of his method of writing in Chapter Six is highly illuminating. The narrator, supposedly Chatterton, lays bare in detail how he copied the original and combined the present style with the old (Ackroyd 1993, 41) culminating in his confession that his “method was as follows” (52). He used materials from old books including “Holinshed” (52), imitated their language and vocabulary and added his own materials to it. As the narrator says, with the materials “I could fabricate an appearance of great Age as closely as if my new invented Papers were the very ones from the Chests of St Mary Redcliffe” (52). Selfreflexive references are made to the novel as an act of creation. The narrator continues: Poetry was my device. I invented my self as a monk of the fifteenth century, Thomas Rowley; I dressed him in Raggs, I made him Blind and then I made him Sing. I compos’d Elegies

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and Epicks, Ballads and Songs, Lyricks and Acrosticks, all of them in that curious contriv’d Style which speedily became the very Token of my own Feelings; for, as I wrote in Rowley’s hand, “Syke yn the Weal of Kynde,” which is as much to say, “All things are partes of One.” (53 emphasis added)

After giving a poem in the style presented above, the narrator comments upon the effect of his writing: “[t]hus, do we see in every Line an Echoe, for the truest Plagiarism is the truest Poetry” (53 emphasis added). This asserts and echoes the novel’s style and strategies: using certain devices and techniques in the act of writing leads to the work as a creation. It imitates and problematises simultaneously. The revelation and reflection of the novel as a construction, contrivance and a process of writing and the importance of narrative devices are made explicit specifically with regard to the terms which are italicised in the sentence. The use and significance of the technique of mise en abyme is highly illuminating here, for this part, supposed to belong to Chatterton, is itself fabricated by a Mr. Joynson, not by Chatterton himself, which is itself fabricated by Ackroyd. However, in a sense it best manifests the style of Thomas Chatterton, Joynson and Ackroyd. These stories or (little) narratives within the novel echo each other in the sense that they reflect each other’s narrative methods whilst problematising each other in that each offers a contradictory version of reality. The strategy, further, problematises notions of transparency, objectivity and passivity esteemed in literary realism, for it requires an active role of readers, as opposed to the passive role literary realism posits for them. As Hutcheon states, in metafiction “the reader is made aware of the fact that literature is less a verbal object carrying some meaning, than it is his own experience of building, from the language, a coherent autonomous whole of form and content. This whole is what is meant here by the term ‘heterocosm’” (1980, 42 emphasis added). The reader’s attention is, accordingly, drawn not to the language as a medium but to the act of construction and creation. Therefore, the text is an artefact and the reader an active agent. Similarly, Merk’s exposition of the techniques and methods employed in the portrait is another mise en abyme which echoes and reflects the strategies and techniques in the novel. Taking the pictures of the painting, Merk realises that the cracks are not as deep as he expected: “most

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of them occurred in the varnish rather than in the paint itself” (Ackroyd 1993, 144). His detailed description and analysis of the painting and the consequent are as follows: So he mixed pure alcohol and water in order to remove this faded exterior and, as slowly he rubbed the dissolvent across the canvas, the newly-exposed paint seemed for a moment to glow in the unaccustomed light and air. With the varnish gone, the successive layers of paint became visible, and Merk could see the outline of some other object glimmering faintly behind the candle and the books. Inside the face of the sitter, too, another face could just barely be discerned; it was a younger face and, as it seemed to Merk, one that expressed suffering. (Ackroyd 1993, 144 emphasis added)

The narrative continues with “[t]he face of the sitter dissolved, becoming two faces, one old and one young” (144 emphasis added). This exposes the method of juxtaposition of the old with the new echoing the painter, Chatterton, Wallis, as well as Ackroyd’s style. A metafictionist sheds light upon the techniques which produce a make-belief by disclosing them just as Merk is doing the painting. The subject matter of the novel here is exposing Ackroyd’s style and technique in this novel. As Hutcheon contends, “[s]ince fiction is not a way of viewing reality, but a reality in its own right, the fictive heterocosm will have its own rules which govern the logic or motivation of its parts. It will have rules or codes of which the reader becomes gradually aware as he proceeds” (1980, 90). The reader is accordingly called upon not to passively accept the text as a direct reference to the external reality but to actively discover the codes and rules governing the heterocosm–the novel, consequently, particularity of the text as opposed to universality postulated in criticism throughout history. Note that the novel is not anti-referential. However, its referentiality is created, made. This is best manifest when Meredith says, “I said that the words were real, Henry. I did not say that what they depicted was real” (Ackroyd 1993, 98). In other words, what they depict–the work of art postulated by literary realism as representational–cannot not refer to an outside referent; its referent is created. As Hutcheon puts it, “the actual referents of those words are not necessarily real in the context of empirical reality” (1980, 90-1). Indeed, to analyse and judge a work of art in terms of its degrees of

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referentiality to the external reality is fallacious, for the very reason that its referent is fictional, not unreal. Another case of the technique of mise en abyme occurs when Philip reads a story called The Last Testament. It is a story of a poet who is “too ill to compose the verses which had brought him eternal fame; that, in fact, it had been the poet’s wife who had written them for him. The plot seemed oddly familiar to Philip but he was not sure if he had read this novel some years before, or if it resembled some daydream of his own” (Ackroyd 1993, 42-3). Then, he turns to the last pages of the book and the story of “an actor who believes himself to be possessed by” some spirits (43). The story he has just read “seemed familiar to Philip” (43). He remembers that he has “read the story of Stage Fire” by Harriet Scrope. It is the story of “a poet who believed himself to be possessed by the spirits of dead writers but who, nevertheless, had been acclaimed as the most original poet of his age” (43). Immediately Philip remembers he has already read The Last Testament: a story by Harriet about a novelist whose secretary, totally aware of her employer’s style, has written many of his works. The story is similar to the one Philip is holding. This section reflects and echoes the occupational relation between Charles and Harriet. Harriet asks Charles to ghost-write her. It also echoes Chatterton’s style, forgeries and the autobiographical section in the novel. Moreover, it is a self-reflexive comment upon Ackroyd’s, as well as other metafictionists’, style and strategies of writing. All are similar in terms of the narrative strategies and techniques they use. The technique of mise en abyme shatters the illusion of objectivity and transparency, for it lays bare the process of creation and offers the work as an artefact. It demystifies and imparts the fictional relation between the novel and its referents to the reader by exposing the strategies and techniques employed by the writer. Not that the novel can by no means refer to the external reality, but that its relation to it is indeed through fictive referents. Hutcheon suggests “such a relation is metaphoric rather than referential (that is with a real referent) . . . the locus of reference gradually changes from the readers’ linguistic, literary, and existential experience in general, to include their experience of that text in particular” (1980, 98). One may possibly suggest it as allegorical, for it is extended throughout the novel. Whether allegorical or metaphoric, it reveals each text creates its own particular referents with

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the help of the reader, hence, particularity of a text, be it of historical or literary. In addition, the readers’ task is more active and difficult, for they must create this heterocosm in their imagination. Also, they must be familiar enough with theoretical issues–a responsibility lacked in literary realism. This leads to another aspect of the novel which makes it distinct from literary realism: parallelism. Whilst realist novels mainly operate through a chronological order, Chatterton is narrated based upon not the chronological order or the cause-and-effect pattern but parallelism. The narrative first establishes itself as the realist novel by the use of biographical information and third person point of view in the vein of literary realism. It benefits from the third person point of view, the first person as in the autobiography and detailed descriptions. It has also a beginning, a middle and an end as in the realist novel. Yet, unlike the realist novel, it ends with three endings each of which at contradiction with the two others. It, then, challenges and violates the conventions and their upshot–representationality– by the introduction of a first-person point of view and dispersion of the narrative with two more stories set at different times. This mingling of three levels of time creates a high amount of selfreflexivity and self-consciousness. It has also the merit of alienation effect which constantly distracts the reader from unconsciously and passively involving in the story not to naïvely accept its reality. Unlike literary realism which aims at presenting a monolithic single God-like authoritative voice or a set of voices which attest each other in giving just one version of reality and meaning, this provides a set of contradictory voices and meanings. The novel, instead, offers multiplicity of voices which are not, in Barthes’s words, “original” but “blend and clash” (2000, 149). Compared to the realist novel, Chatterton is more heterogeneous and carnivalesque due to its selfcontradictory versions of reality and dispersion of chronological order. Liberal humanisms’ notions of rationality as created by the chronological order, causal relationships, originality and authority which all lay claim to a final truth (reality) are accordingly questioned. It, instead, proposes a parallel relation between the (little) narratives within the novel. The autobiography section in which Chatterton is exposing his own style and forgeries is an attempt to show that the text is autorepresentational. In effect, having a character within the narrative relate his own tale and story draws the reader’s attention away from the authoritative

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voice (the third person point of view) toward the work as an artefact. It also creates a mise en abyme, thus, auto-referentiality. The third person omniscient point of view is imitated to confirm reliability. It, however, is questioned by a shift to the first person by a character within the narrative relating his own tale. The novel alternates between different narrative voices. Even regardless of the shift in the point of view, the third person point of view itself is not homogeneous. It stands for different voices. For instance, the third person point of view in the prologue establishes and confirms the agreed idea of the death of Chatterton as a suicide. Nonetheless, it assumes another voice whilst presenting Charles’s sections: Chatterton faked his own death and continued under different names. The novel provides a multiplicity of voices which contradict and question each other. Therefore, literary realism’s objective reliable narrator assuming a God-like position is highly questioned. In other words, this implies that the reliability and credibility the reader of the realist novel may assume for the third person point of view is accordingly questioned and contested. Namely, the three levels of time and characters presented in the narrative have many things in common. Almost all the major characters are artists, suffer from despair and poverty, copy other’s works with their own innovation and are in love with the past. Thus, they parallel and echo each other. The three major characters (Chatterton, Meredith and Charles) are great lovers of antiquity and art: many times the narrative (including Chatterton’s assumed autobiography) refers to Chatterton as a lover of antiquity. Charles’s rapturous curiosity about the painting extended by his historical investigation of the painting and the documents is an indication of his interest in art and the past. In addition, the discussion of art between Meredith and Wallis indicates their obsession with art and literature. Moreover, they echo each other in that they are all forgers. In this sense, Ackroyd is similar to Chatterton. Just as Chatterton imitated the voice of a medieval monk, so Ackroyd brings the eighteenth-century poet alive; that is, he has faked Chatterton. Furthermore, in Chapter Eight Merk is introduced as a forger. As he tells Sadleir: “You don’t see what’s staring you in the face. You don’t see that I painted all of Seymour’s last pictures” (Ackroyd 1993, 88). He passed his work off as Seymour. Sadleir has kept most of the paintings, for he knows by Seymour’s death the price will increase. Seymour is in despair,

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suffers from arthritis and cannot even “hold a newspaper” (71). Once more, the motivation behind the act of forgery is laid bare: economic incentives and interests. Again, a parallel is made between Merk, Charles, Chatterton and Meredith. This exposes the ideological or personal interests involved in the production of a work of art which the reader of the realist novel has been persuaded to mistakenly accept as direct access to reality. The technique functions in the vein of mise en abyme: by focusing upon the act of forgery amongst the characters, it self-reflexively comments upon the novel’s methods and strategies. In so doing, the novel consequently introduces itself as an artefact, not a medium through which reality is accessible. As another case in point, at the end of the section where Charles is introduced, he feels the appearance of Thomas Chatterton touching his shoulder, aware of his sickness and despair. This is boosted by the symbolic act of the leaves falling from the trees coinciding with Charles’s pain (2). Similar to Chatterton, Charles lives in poverty recognising “how poor he was and how much poorer he was likely to become” (5). Charles is sick too: “[m]y heart does ache now. . . . And a drowsy numbness pains my sense” (26). Once more, a parallel is made between Chatterton and Charles. The strategy questions the realist method of narrating based upon chronological order (as employed in history-writing). It also brings the theoretical issue into the surface making it as a theme. By contrast, the realist novel makes attempts to hide its artistic techniques to offer itself as an objective medium. Charles and Meredith at times feel the apparition of Chatterton. Meredith has seen the image of Chatterton a few times: “‘[h]ave you passed Chatterton on the stairs again, George?’ he [Wallis] said at last. ‘What was that?’ ‘In your dream. You told me how you saw Chatterton’” (98). Even before that Meredith has seen the apparition of Chatterton: “‘[n]ow I have nothing to say.’ But he was silent only for a moment. ‘Did I tell you, Henry, that I dreamed of Chatterton the other night? I was passing him on some old stairs. What does that signify?’” to which Wallis retorts, “‘I believe stairs are an emblem. Was that your word? Stairs are an emblem of time’” (86). Meredith is going to commit suicide but is dissuaded when he sees Chatterton’s spirit. Here again he is associated with Chatterton, not through a causal relation as in the realist novel but because Chatterton is reported to have committed suicide. At the end of the novel, Charles, Meredith and Chatterton who are dead join whilst holding their hands together: “[t]wo

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others have joined him [Chatterton]. . . . They link hands, and bow towards the sun” (147). This is the culmination of violating realist conventions of causality and chronological order. Moreover, the novel exposes that the ending is artificially and artistically fabricated as opposed to the happy ending of the realist novel. The reader accordingly realises that, as Meredith says, “[t]he greatest realism is also the greatest fakery” (86). As is implied, realism is the production of an artistic act. The real turns out to be a fake, hence, creation and fabrication of reality. To create a sense of realism one has to fake and to fake is not realistic, for the production is not the original. The novel, therefore, draws upon the very convention of the realist novel whilst questioning its representationality by self-reflexively drawing the reader’s attention to the process of the text’s construction. Self-reflexivity highly challenges and questions representationality and literary realism’s claim to objective reality. The strategies discussed so far do create a great amount of self-reflexivity. Aside from them, selfreflexivity is also best manifest in the novel’s involvement and obsession with art and literature as well as its own strategies and techniques. Indeed, it is self-conscious–conscious of its own status as an artefact. That is, it takes as a theme and brings to the level of subject matter theoretical and philosophical issues concerning art and the ways through which a work of art including the novel itself is constructed and accordingly given meaning artistically–by artistic manipulation of techniques. Unlike the realist novel that tries to present itself as a “slice of life” which is unified, coherent, objective, monolithic, authoritative and transparent, the novel exposes its conventionality through self-reflexivity and self-consciousness. Bringing theoretical issues into the novel as a subject matter disrupts any realistic representation as well as the novel’s direct and objective access to the external world. The overt discussion of, and obsession with, art and literature amongst the characters is highly illuminating. Almost all characters (including Chatterton, Charles, Meredith, Harriet, Wallis, Philip, Merk, Maitland, Cumberland and Tilt) are involved in art and its criticism. Whereas the realist novel establishes itself as a medium to the external reality to institutionalise representationality, Chatterton presents itself as a criticism in artistic practice and in view of that highlights its autoreferentiality.

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Self-reflexivity lays bare the devices and challenges the notions of objectivity and impersonality of the artist as promulgated in realism. As Patricia Waugh contends, “[i]n literary fiction it is, in fact, possible only to ‘represent’ the discourses of that world” (1986, 4). This is made possible through exposing the discourses, including that of liberal humanism, by narrative strategies including self-reflexivity. Furthermore, the technique helps the novel underlie the discourses of literary realism and liberal humanism. By overtly discussing theoretical and artistic issues, the novel, therefore, suggests that reality is made in the discourse by artistic strategies and techniques such as those manipulated in the portrait that Charles possesses and the techniques which Merk reveals. Edward asks his father, “‘[h]e’s alive in the picture, isn’t he?’” Charles replies, “‘[s]eeing is believing,’” (Ackroyd 1993, 80), a view also shared by Sarah (72). This is a self-reflexive remark upon the realist art which exposes the realist convention of mimesis and imitation. This obsession with art and literature and artistic creation is made more apparent and extended regarding the symbolic name of Mr. Sybil Poetry Leno who keeps uttering “[p]oetry and poverty” (6 emphasis added) and the discussion of poetry between Charles and Andrew Flint, or Mr. Slimmer form whom “poetry must be direct and it must be inspired” (100 emphasis added), to name but a few. The preoccupation with art culminates and becomes more intensified in the portrait Charles possesses which has a symbolic function. It assumes different meanings whose multiplicity is elaborated upon in the next chapter. Amongst them is its symbolic representational significance: it stands for the act of representation of reality. In this sense, it is a microcosm for art in general and the present novel in particular. However, whilst it stands for the real Thomas Chatterton, the portrait fails; as Wallis, whose ideas and attitudes can stand for the mimetic view of art, feeling impatient and uncomfortable finds it impossible to “portray the human body in all its glory” (102)–to portray the things as they really are. A kind of poetic revelation occurs to him. Finally, Merk is asked to touch up the portrait so that it may look more real. Nevertheless, as he is doing so it self-destructs. This symbolically marks the impossibility of the representation of reality. In effect, it reflects and mirrors the novel itself, hence, problematisation of representation. Discussions over the portrait Charles possesses and the one by Wallis and the techniques employed in them self-reflexively lay bare the

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novel’s style and narrative strategies. Therefore, as discussed, the novel self-reflexively refers to itself and its artistic creation at the level of both subject matter and structure. It can suggestively be presented as a new Poetics or Defence of Poetry defending art and literature and rejecting any view and judgement of art based upon real-unreal binary opposition as a valid touchstone. As Hutcheon puts it, “[t]ruth is a meaningless criterion, for art is not verifiable” (1980, 132). In this light, Sarah questions the validity of such a criterion by saying “‘who’s to say what is real and what is unreal?’” (Ackroyd 1993, 22) when the real is a construct. As metafiction, this novel is obsessed with form and structure to break the automatisation. “The breaking of the frame of convention,” as Waugh contends, “deliberately lays bare the process of automatization that occurs when a content totally appropriates a form, paralysing it with fixed associations which gradually remove it from the range of current viable artistic possibilities” (1986, 68-9). Therefore, once again, any mimetic view of literature as universal and objective which requires a passive reader is called into question by the novel’s drawing the reader’s attention to its particular construction. About Stewart Merk the narrator says, he “was a fine and subtle painter but one who was preoccupied with technique. For him the pleasure of painting rested in formal execution and not in imaginative exploration, in mimesis rather than invention” (1993, 129 emphasis added). Nonetheless, he ironically exposes the devices by scrutinising the portrait. In so doing and drawing the reader’s attention to the work’s fictionality, he undermines any absolute mimetic relation between the work and the external reality. Similarly, Ackroyd is obsessed and concerned with form, however, for a hybrid purpose: to suggest representationality and auto-representationality. Making an ironic contrast between Merk’s mimetic view and his self-reflexive act of exposing the techniques, the novel indeed lays bare its own narrative strategy. Also, Charles’s failure in noticing the documents as fakes is due to his representational view, for he does not realise that they are created through employing realist strategies. Self-reflexivity and the novel’s obsession with art and its own narrative techniques undermine its historical referentiality by offering it as an artefact whilst real and historical information gives credibility and plausibility to the fictive, thus, problematisation of referentiality. In fact, Meredith’s words indicate postmodernists’ stance

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concerning the issue of representation: “‘I can endure death. It is the representation of death I cannot bear’” (2, 86). As implied in Meredith’s, the novel does not reject its relation to the outside world as representational; nor does it deny the reality. However, it asserts that representation is the production of a set of artistic conventions, consequently, created, not given. In short, the problematisation of the representation of reality in Chatterton was discussed in the light of postmodern theories. First, the narrative techniques and strategies specifically parody by which the representation of reality in historiography is put in a crisis were explored at the level of structure and subject matter. Second, it was shown how the narrative aims at problematising historiography and referentiality by imitating and simultaneously taking distance from it to suggest reality as a construct. Finally, how the narrative used and abused the conventions of literary realism with regard to narrative strategies and techniques to problematise the representation of reality and reference was delineated and discussed. In the next chapter, I examine and analyse Chatterton to show how boundaries are blurred in the novel to problematise modernist antirepresentationality. Furthermore, I elaborate upon how meaning is constructed through artistic process.

CHAPTER FOUR BOUNDARIES BLURRED Introduction “In any case novelists don’t work in a vacuum.” (Ackroyd 1993, 64)

In this chapter, I explore how different boundaries are blurred to problematise the representational and anti-representational views. Indeed, Chatterton is not completely anti-representational. As opposed to modernism and especially the avant-garde for which the novel is totally autonomous, it makes the representation of reality possible by now and again referring to the historical, that is the outside world. However, it questions this idea, but does not reject it, which problematises modernism’s anti-representationality. The novel rather asserts that reality is a human construct created in the process of narration. In effect, the novel simultaneously portrays both anti-representation and representation. It constantly reminds the reader of the artificiality of its representation not in a sense that representation is impossible, but that it is created in the process of narration. Art refers to the outside world. Yet, its reference is through fictive referents. Indeed, the novel as a type of historiographic metafiction is still imitative, however, with a critical eye. It resorts to imitation in order to question the relationship between the work and the external reality as real and natural. It asserts that the relation is constructed by human agents through the artistic process of narration. To do so the novel dismantles and blurs the traditional and conventional boundaries within a narrative. I further focus upon the novel’s obsession with its own process of construction to demonstrate how meaning is constructed. The novel reveals that meaning is created through certain narrative techniques and strategies such as parody and mise en abyme. In other words, it is not a product but a process. Therefore, different narrative strategies and emplotments result in

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different meanings each of which completely contradicts the others. I explore instances where the novel problematises representationality by selfconsciously referring to itself as an artefact, to the process of writing and to its diegetic–telling–status.

Boundaries Blurred “But who is to say what is fake and what is real?” (Ackroyd 1993, 70)

As mentioned earlier, Chatterton obscures the conventional boundaries, particularly binary oppositions including life/art, original/fake, reality/fiction, art/criticism, history/fiction, form/content and so on and so forth. Historiographic metafiction calls into question and dismantles the boundaries which have ideological implications privileging the one over the other. It does so to challenge the naturalness and transparency of these totalising discourses which remain unquestioned in literary realism. It uses the very conventional boundaries whilst questioning them by drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that they are not natural but arbitrary, made by human beings with political, economic and/or ideological interests. Of central significance is the boundary between reality and fiction, respectively implying representation and anti-representation. Postmodernist re-presentation contests liberal humanism’s attempt to separate the artistic from the real. It does so by making manifest the paradoxes in the integration of the aesthetic and the real (Hutcheon 1988, xii), be it political, historical or social. Antirepresentationality, as expressed especially in the avant-garde prescribing a total break from the past and a focus upon anti-representationality of the text, is accordingly questioned in the novel. As Hutcheon puts it, “[w]hat historiographic metafiction challenges is both any naïve realist concept of representation but also any equally naïve textualist or formalist assertions of the total separation of art from the world” (1988, 125). This is most evident in bringing the historical into the fictive through paratexts. Consequently, the text refers to the outside world. Thus, insertion of the historical within the narrative which is in the form of prose results in producing a sense of realism. In this chapter, I explore different cases of obscuring binary oppositions in Chatterton, especially the one between the real and the fictive.

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Throughout the novel external connections are made between art and real life. This is reflected at the level of form by using different narrative strategies and at the level of subject matter by discussing the very idea. The most significant factor in deconstructing anti-representationality is that the novel is about an historical figure. Real references are made to Chatterton’s life and career. Paratexts contribute to the possibility of representation. For instance, Chatterton’s and Meredith’s real poems are interspersed throughout the novel which manifest and establish an external connection between the inner world of the text and that of the external reality. This stands at odds with modernism which abandons the historical for the sake of the text’s autonomy. Moreover, the obsession with the past and the historical is highly emphasised in studying the portrait Charles possesses. In effect, the act of studying the portrait stands for the act of studying the historical past as is done by historiographers. Hence, this indicates the novel’s approximate relation to the outside world, the past, for knowing is a matter of representation. We come to know the past through representation, be it historical or literary, which is now blurred in the novel. Accordingly, the novel highlights its possible representationality. It self-reflexively and selfconsciously draws the reader’s attention to artistic possibility of representing the external reality by suggesting itself as an historical text. In Hutcheon’s words “[p]ostmodernist reference, then, differs from modernist reference in its overt acknowledgement of the existence, if relative inaccessibility, of the past real (except through discourse)” (1988, 146). Indeed, this acknowledgement implies that the real exists but is constructed through an artistic process. Postmodernism’s acknowledgement of the existence of the real as a social, ideological construct through the process of representation undermines modernism’s autonomy, for it highlights literature’s worldliness. Nonetheless, the very modernist self-reflexivity undermines the possibility of representationality established in the novel by drawing the reader’s attention to the novel’s status as an artefact. Whereas modernism does not challenge its autonomy and status as an art, historiographic metafiction including Chatterton does. The acknowledged implausible, fictional elements, help the reader to assume the work’s artistic autonomy. Yet, the historical references to real events offer degrees of worldliness, hence, the novel as representational. In fact, Chatterton

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problematises both representationality and anti-representationality of art in general and literature in particular. Of central significance in problematisation of anti-representationality suggesting the possibility of representationality is the implication of the portrait of Chatterton that Charles possesses. Many times the novel points to the portrait’s possibility of artistic representation. After Charles dies Edward looks at the portrait. Although it is already revealed that the portrait is a fake, the narrator says, “‘Chatterton’ remained, securely fastened to the wall, and to Edward it seemed even more real; it was brighter, perhaps even larger, than before” (Ackroyd 1993, 144). The painting seems “brighter,” for it has been given other meanings more illuminating for Edward and possibly for the sophisticated reader. Here the painting, although it is a fake, refers to the external reality which is the real Chatterton. It also makes references to Charles himself. Edward “knew that ‘Chatterton’ had some connection with his father’s own death” (145). Edward sees the portrait as representing both Chatterton and his own father. This connection is not just made by verisimilitude, but by parallelism. There is something shared by the two which is best reflected in the portrait: hopelessness, despair and death and therefore the representationality of art. Moreover, this effect is created through artistic techniques used by the painter, suggesting the possibility of artistic representation. The portrait seems so real to Edward that he could “smell the arsenic” (145). Edward sees his own father again in his own reflection in the glass in front of him. As the narrator describes the scene, “Edward had not yet chosen to look closely at the man lying upon the bed but now, when he did so, he stepped back in astonishment: it was his father lying there” (145). As the narrative continues, “[h]e could not move and after a few moments he realised that he was staring at the reflection of his own face in the glass, just in the place where his father’s face had been. And now Edward was smiling, too. He had seen his father again. He would always be here, in the painting. He would never wholly die” (145 emphasis added). As is implied, the past will never wholly die. It returns in the narrative. Therefore, it is possible to represent the past. This highly suggests the possibility of artistic representation, an idea underpinned by Hutcheon and Waugh. As Hutcheon puts it, “[s]elf-reflective fiction, even in its most overt diegetic form, does not mean the death of the novel as a mimetic genre, but perhaps rather its

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salvation” (1980, 70). To Waugh “[m]etafiction, then, does not abandon ‘the real world’ for the narcissistic pleasures of the imagination” (1986, 18). In addition, the immortality of the artist suggested in the novel is due to the possibility of artistic representation. The terms “reflection” and “glass” highlight the idea of art as mirroring. Therefore, the novel still holds to mimetic possibilities. The same idea is reiterated at the end of the novel where Chatterton says, “I will not wholly die, then” (Ackroyd 1993, 147); for he will live on in future representations of himself such as that painted by Wallis and through his own poetry as well as Chatterton. Indeed, it is also a self-reflexive comment upon the representationality of the novel itself implying its possibility. Chatterton says, “[m]y syllables, the remnants of antiquity. . . . Will come back as shadows for posterity” (136). Ackroyd is using Chatterton’s lines for expressing the idea of the possibility of artistic representation. The past is still a living presence, yet, its presence is made possible through artistic representations. The author employs actual lines of Chatterton’s poetry and their meanings implying the possibility of artistic representation to relate it to the novel’s representationality. In other words, as Chatterton’s poem implies, representation is possible through art by employing artistic techniques and strategies such as Chatterton’s use of archaic words to fabricate a medieval poem. Moreover, modernism is not usually obsessed with history and history-writing. The avant-garde, specifically, is a total break from the past, whereas the novel’s profound obsession with history, historiography and historical representation is of great significant. This return for posterity is absent in modernism and specifically in the avant-garde. Chatterton, however, undermines the idea by self-reflexively suggesting itself as a fabrication, an artefact. On the one hand, it points out the possibility of representation. On the other, it discloses that representation is artificially constructed through extracts, here Chatterton’s lines taken from the real world, and consequently challenges both referentiality and anti-representationality of literature. In effect, as Hutcheon points out, the world of fiction “has direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that empirical reality” (1988, 125). In other words, metafiction confirms its “aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the ‘world’” (Hutcheon 1988, 125). This can be read as the most significant difference between the realist novel and postmodernist

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novel as well as between the modernist novel and postmodernist novel. Whilst the realist novel makes attempts to offer itself as the very external reality through verisimilitude and modernist novel as totally autonomous, postmodernist fiction aims at the two; that is, being self-reflexive and autonomous, it makes direct connections to the outside world as in Chatterton to mark the artificiality of reality. The possibility of artistic representation also manifests in Wallis’s painting and discussion with Meredith. Wallis points out the possibility of artistic immortalisation when he tells Meredith that, “you will be immortalised” to which Meredith retorts “‘[n]o doubt. But will it be Meredith or will it be Chatterton? I merely want to know’” (Ackroyd 1993, 2). This indicates the possibility of artistic representation. Although its meaning is not fixed, the portrait represents something. This is supported by the fact that the portrait has always been able to represent Chatterton, even though mistakenly. The portrait is referential, whether it refers to Chatterton or Meredith. Whereas modernism suggests the loss of meaning or meaninglessness of art and the world, postmodernist art represents something, hence, representationality of art. The outside world and the world of discourse bear no especial meaning as modernists try to suggest, whilst postmodernist metafiction endorses the existence of meaning as made manifest in the above example. It, nonetheless, points out the artificiality of meaning and representationality. For instance, modernists leave the text without a sense of ending to suggest the meaninglessness, loss or lack of any beginning, middle and end both in fiction and in the world. As Waugh realises, “[m]odernist texts begin by plunging in in medias res and end with the sense that nothing is finished, that life flows on. Metafictional novels often begin with an explicit discussion of the arbitrary nature of beginnings, of boundaries” (1986, 29 emphasis added). Waugh’s comments explain why metafictionists, including Ackroyd, blur the divisions to reveal the process through which such boundaries are constructed. As in Chatterton, postmodernist novels draw upon the beginning-middle-end pattern however self-reflexively and selfconsciously not to deny the existence of it but to suggest that it is an artistic construct. Beginnings, middles and ends are artificially constructed. This is most effectively shown in the artificial ending of the novel where the three major characters join hands.

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The possibility of artistic representation is once more evident in the narrator’s commenting upon Wallis’s painting. As the narrator says: And it was with a kind of pity that Wallis looked at the face of Meredith, which had become the face of Chatterton in death– not pity for himself at finishing the work but for the thing he had created. This garret he had painted had become an emblem of the world–a world of darkness, the papers scattered across the floor its literature, the dying flower its perfume, the extinguished candle its source of light and heat. (Ackroyd 1993, 107)

As indicated, Wallis’s painting now can stand for Chatterton not necessarily because of the resemblance between Meredith and Chatterton but because of the parallelism made between the two. The portrait represents death and despair in both Meredith’s and Chatterton’s life. As a critic states, “Wallis’s representation of Meredith as dead carries a prophetic force that leads to the real death of his marriage to Mary” (Finney 1992, 255). Meredith continues, “[a]nd that is why . . . this will always be remembered as the true death of Chatterton” (Ackroyd 1993, 99). In other words, posterities will remember Chatterton through this work of art, hence, the possibility of artistic representation. The possibility of artistic representation is also manifest in Philip’s hybrid comment upon the manuscripts. He points to the same idea in saying the manuscripts “‘were real . . . but they were not real . . .’” (142). Art is both representational and anti-representational. This is what is meant by the problematisation of the representation of reality. For instance, Meredith’s words that “the greatest realism is also the greatest fakery” (86) imply the possibility of artistic representation. Fakery–art–can become realism by the use of certain artistic techniques. This idea is extended throughout the novel. Sarah Tilt’s study of the issue of death is another witness of the possibility of artistic representation of reality expanded in the novel: She had examined the various images of death, from the medieval depiction of the emaciated cadaver to the theatrical richness of Baroque funerary monuments, from the lugubrious narratives of Victorian genre painting to the abstract violence of contemporary art, and so she was now able to chart many of the

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As the term “presentation” indicates, Sarah envisions her own death in the reflection or representation of death in artistic works, be they literature or paintings. Therefore, the boundary between life and art–representation and anti-representation in a sense–is constantly obfuscated. Hutcheon suggests auto-representationality for this hybrid status. As she says, in autorepresentation “[r]epresentation is not annulled but turned in on itself, and the ‘narration’ invades and pervades the ‘fiction’” (1980, 35). Alternatively, this study suggests the terms of postmodernist re-presentation, for they imply the novel’s possibility of reflecting both the outer and inner world of the text. Paradoxically as it may seem, historiographic metafiction is still imitative, yet, it challenges the imitative view of art by imitation. Therefore, no literary work can be totally autonomous. Blurring the boundaries and consequently the absent-present state of affairs is extended throughout the novel and goes so far as to include the issue of originality and creation as opposed to forgery, fake, copying, borrowing and second-rate replicas. This can be investigated at the level of subject matter, which is overtly self-reflexive and the structure. Whilst modernism and especially the avant-garde crave for originality of the art, innovation and creation, historiographic metafiction casts doubt upon the notions in their pure sense of the term–no art can be totally original. Metafictionists blur the boundary by suggesting that the fake can be original and creative. In fact, they challenge such notions. There is an overt discussion of art and the issue of originality as opposed to borrowing in the novel when Philip points to the issue and asks, “[a]nd so what did Harriet’s borrowings matter?” (Ackroyd 1993, 43). Borrowing, which in itself is an action considered to be inferior by modernists and in particular by the avantgarde, can instead be viewed as equalling originality. This is best evident in the narrator’s words describing Philip’s state of mind upon the issue that, “[i]n any case, Philip believed that there were only a limited number of plots in the world (reality was finite, after all) and no doubt it was inevitable that they would be reproduced in a variety of contexts” (43). This questions both realism and modernism. First, reality is not finite. On the contrary, different versions of an event to which the narrator refers as reality may produce

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different meanings and consequently different realities, hence, multiplicity of reality. Second, the idea of innovation and creativity of modernism, especially emphasised by the avant-garde, is also questioned. That is, they do not recommend putting old literary materials and themes in a new way and using conventional techniques. Most modernists were highly experimental, trying to completely break away from the past, whereas metafictionists reuse old materials and artistic techniques to create something new, as Ackroyd resorts to numerous times in his novel via the allusions to Eliot’s poems. The pamphlet Charles and Philip hold reads, “‘Chatterton knew that original genius consists in forming new and happy combinations, rather than in searching after thoughts and ideas which had never occurred before’” (36 emphasis added). This is a self-reflexive comment upon the way Ackroyd is writing in the novel, challenging the conventional notion of originality. As opposed to the definition of the idea of originality and creativity by modernists, the narrative instead offers an idea close to Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence. Taking the latter idea into consideration, one might not call the novel original and creative in the sense that modernists and especially the avant-garde define the terms. In other words, modernists and the avant-garde crave for a separation from the past conventions including the style of previous writers, but Chatterton questions the notions and suggests that an artist may be influenced by others’ styles and ideas so that one cannot tell the artist’s voice from others. This is manifest in Harriet and Philip’s career as writers. Regarding their novels, the narrator comments: The fact that two of Harriet Scrope’s novels resembled the much earlier work of Harrison Bentley might even be coincidental. He [Philip] was less inclined to criticise her, also, because of his own experience. He had once attempted to write a novel but he had abandoned it after some forty pages: not only had he written with painful slowness and uncertainty, but even the pages he had managed to complete seemed to him to be filled with images and phrases from the work of other writers whom he admired. It had become a patchwork of other voices and other styles, and it was the overwhelming difficulty of recognising his own voice among them that had led him to abandon the project. So what right did he have to condemn Miss Scrope? (Ackroyd 1993, 43 emphasis added)

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This is a self-reflexive comment upon both historiography and fictionwriting. One cannot be original and completely innovative when breaking from the past. As the narrator points out, a critic like Philip cannot easily recognise the original voice in a piece of literary work. However, that is not a flaw in postmodernist sense. Here the narrative voice is that of a postmodernist, such as Ackroyd in this case, who self-reflexively expresses the novel’s own style of writing. It is also a commentary upon fictionmaking in general. Even the boundary between forgery and the anxiety of influence are shattered. As a case in point, after Harriet quotes from Eliot but attributes it to Shakespeare, Charles says “‘[i]t’s called the anxiety of influence’” (62). Thus, the nature of forgery and the anxiety of influence remains problematic. The idea is also expressed in Philip’s words talking to Vivien. He comments, “‘[s]o I tried writing my own novel but it didn’t work, you know. I kept on imitating other people. I had no real story, either, but now . . . with this–with Charles’s theory–I might be able to’” (146-7). This passage challenges the avant-garde’s idea of innovation and a complete break from the past. He fails to write a novel due to the fear of copying others, but now he finds it possible when being original is not equal to say what nobody has not said before. Thanks to this new view of literature, he is now able to use a familiar story and say it in different ways. He says, “I must tell it in my own way” (147). Then he continues, “‘I might discover that I had a style of my own, after all’” (147). As Philip observes, writers tell familiar stories, allude to others and copy others whilst still being original and having their own style. As Waugh points out, “[m]etafiction . . . offers both innovation and familiarity through the individual reworking and undermining of familiar conventions” (1986, 12). Philip’s observation is self-reflexive that echoes Ackroyd’s own style and manner of storytelling in the novel. In the same manner, Ackroyd has made a familiar story the subject of his work. When viewed as a self-reflexive commentary, the abovementioned example also takes an artistic shape at the level of form regarding allusions to other writers and their styles. The narrative practices what it preaches, if anything. It draws upon the conventions both used in literary texts and historiography to blur predominantly conventional boundaries. The narrative is an imitation of the realist novel whilst creating distance from it. The idea of originality is highly questioned by parodying, that is,

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copying whilst keeping distance from what it imitates, that is, the hypertext. Yet, as discussed earlier, parody is not a mere copy or quotation. The novel quotes from writers including T. S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “Ash Wednesday” and The Waste Land), John Keats and William Wordsworth without mentioning their names, an act generally considered to be plagiarism or intellectual property theft. Nevertheless, it results in the emergence of a work which is completely different from a realist or a modernist work whilst still sharing affinities. The absent-present and hybrid state of affairs in the novel is achieved through already-established conventions. Sadleir is an art dealer whose act of forgery reflects the same theory. He declares that the three nudes’ paintings are fakes. He confesses that he himself is a forger. Then, the greatest poets are fakers and pieces of art are fakes in the same vein. Nonetheless, as Merk observes, “who is to say what is fake and what is real?” (Ackroyd 1993, 70). One might conclude that Chatterton “the greatest literary forger of all time” (13), Sadleir, Harriet and Ackroyd himself are all great forgers and simultaneously the most original artists. Therefore, subverting such boundaries highlights the fact they are arbitrary constructions and that no singular object or thing containing pureness, completeness and perfection exists. The idea is expressed in Mr Leno’s words: “[t]his is not a perfect world” (6). Likewise, there is no completely autonomous work of art, for in Harriet’s words “[i]n any case novelists don’t work in a vacuum” (64), just as there is no totally representational work of art, as the novel try to demonstrate. This is also true of history. There are fantastic and fictive elements in history and there are elements which refer to the external reality in literature. The idea that there is no autonomous and original work of art is also manifest in the symbolic use of the setting. For instance, describing Charles’s house the narrator comments that: “[c]ertain of the original features had been retained, however–in particular the staircase which, although some of its boards were sagging and many of its banisters were chipped or broken . . .” (7 emphasis added). This description most aptly exemplifies postmodernism’s problematisation of originality, be it of history or of a literary text. Also, the scene where Philip is witnessing a boy and a young man walking is of symbolic significance: Then he [the small boy] disappeared behind a canopied tomb beside the nave and a few moments later a young man emerged

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Chapter Four from the other side; it was as if there had been a sudden transformation within this ancient church. Philip was about to rise from his seat in astonishment when he saw both the boy and the young man passing at the top of the nave; they walked by each other without any sign of greeting or recognition, and the light from the window behind them blurred their outlines as they crossed. Philip could see only shadows in front of him, and their footsteps made no noise. (33-4 emphasis added)

Philip is waiting for their coming from the church. This ancient church is not what it used to be. The past, like the church, has undergone transformation and changes. Philip sees only shadows. This foreshadows Charles’s coming from the church and having manuscripts which are supposed to reveal the truth. This symbolically foreshadows the impossibility of the manuscripts to be of any help. They do not illuminate but rather obfuscate and create more questions. The boundaries between fiction and reality as well as originality and second-handedness are so blurred that it is impossible to discern reality from art. The same idea that art and reality cannot be distinguishable recurs when Harriet realises that she can take a familiar plot as a “vessel for her own style” (63). Similarly, Ackroyd in the novel has resorted to a generally known story of Chatterton. He has made the idea of the representation of reality, which has been discussed throughout history, a subject matter. He has also used and abused others’ styles, themes and lines from others’ works. Nevertheless, he is still original, for he has used and simultaneously abused them to problematise the representational and anti-representational views of art. Harriet, then, took Bentley’s novel as her “vessel” and “altered the characters, changed their relationships, and, by the end, only the barest outline of Bentley’s initial situation remained in place” (63). Accordingly, whether the work is a mere copy or original is a problematising issue. Moreover, any idea of originality is under question. As the narrator says, “[t]he experience of employing a plot, even though it was the invention of some other writer, had liberated her imagination; and, from that time forward, all her novels were her own work. But in recent years even this originality had begun to bore her” (63). However, Harriet still feels anxious about plagiarising:

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She could not bring herself to admit the borrowing, and this mainly for reasons of pride; but, even if she did not herself confess to it, the plagiarism might in any case be discovered and an unwarranted suspicion cast over the rest of her work–even over her first novel. Anxious reflection had so nourished the problem that it seemed to encompass the whole of her past. There was no escape from it. (63)

This is a self-reflexive comment upon the most original writers. Not that the writer itself does not exist, but rather that originality in their writing does not exist. Chatterton’s own career as a counterfeiter is central to the discussion. He was highly influential for Romantic poets, but his creations were faked. Chatterton, Meredith, Harriet and Ackroyd himself are pretending and drawing from the style of other writers. Nonetheless, the postmodernist way of borrowing and copying others–parodying indeed–is in a sense original, innovative and creative, although it contradicts the avant-garde’s definition of these qualities. The postmodernist method is essentially copying with critical distance. The novel suggests that “Blake was influenced by the work of a forger and a plagiarist” (45), that is Chatterton. The reader is left with the assumption that the whole Romantic generation was influenced by Chatterton. Therefore, the idea of Romantic poets as being original is called into question. Yet, their poetry and literature are still considered original. Ackroyd’s own literary style reflects the novel’s subject matter. This is clearly evident in the discussion between Joynson and Chatterton, in which Joynson says: “‘[a]nd when at last you admit these Works to be your own, the Confession will bring you Fame’” (56). Chatterton retorts, “‘[t]he Fame of a great Plagiarist?’” “‘No, the Fame of a great Poet. You prove your Strength by doing their Work better than ever they could, and then by also doing your own,’” Joynson replies (56). Chatterton’s fabrication of Rowley brought him fame, “the fame of a great Poet” in Joynson terms. His works highly impressed a generation famous for its originality. Therefore, an act may assume different meanings through the passage of time and by narration. Meaning is created in the process of writing. This is made possible by blurring the boundary between originality and imitation. Furthermore, this amount of self-reflexivity and the artistic manipulation of literary criticism and discussions within the narrative lead

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to another transcended boundary: art/criticism. The allusions, fictive characters, stories within the novel and self-reflexivity pointing to the process of construction emphasise the work as an artefact, whereas serious theoretical discussions bandied between the characters make the text a work of criticism. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the novel can be regarded as a new defence of poetry. This appears most prominently in Wallis and Meredith’s overt discussion over art, the idea of representationality of art and artistic techniques. In this light, the text is a serious theoretical piece of criticism in artistic form. Furthermore, taking literature and writing as a major subject matter for an historical story, that of Chatterton, is the culmination of blurring the boundary between history and fiction. It does so in a critical way to challenge both any realist view of literature and any modernist break from or nostalgic return to, history. It also shatters the binary opposition of form and content. Literary fragments merge into each other. In the middle of one part the other continues. In addition, the three different stories merge into each other. The structure and form of the novel reflect the subject matter, content. The novelist manipulates techniques and strategies of writing and the idea of representation discussed by the characters at the level of structure. The novel aesthetic obsession, as is evident in the combination of the historical and the literary, paratextuality and extracts from poet’s poems and self-reflexivity, reflects the theoretical discussions over aestheticism and art and vice versa. Therefore, the novel makes reference to the outside world–representationality–as opposed to anti-representationality. The conventional boundaries defining and privileging notions such as originality, innovation and creativity over copying, borrowing and forgery are also blurred. In the next section, I examine the novel’s obsession with, and emphasis upon, the construction of meaning as a process rather than a product.

Meaning as a Process “I suppose that’s the trouble with history. It’s the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.” (Ackroyd 1993, 143)

As opposed to literary realism which treats the work of art and meaning as a product, postmodernist metafiction focuses upon the idea of meaning as constructed in the process of narration. Metafiction holds narrative

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techniques and strategies responsible for producing different meanings. It also differs from modernism, which itself postulates a meaninglessness of both life and art by implying that meaning exists but is created through narrative techniques and strategies. It does not overlook the diegetic aspect of the work; on the contrary, it demonstrates how its composition is made up. Chatterton self-reflexively and self-consciously points out its process of construction and accordingly suggests meaning is constructed in the process of narration. This meaning-as-a-process status is extended throughout the novel. Nevertheless, in this section I analyse the leading and central cases that indicate the idea of meaning as constructed in an artistic process. Wallis’ painting in which he uses Meredith as a model for Chatterton acquires different literary and historical meanings. Although it is supposed to represent merely Chatterton, it stands for other persons and concepts as well. Its meaning changes through the passage of time. The narrator self-reflexively lays bare the process of construction: Meredith was contemplating the rough surface of the road: “The effect of that painting,” he began to say quite suddenly, “will be quite different from anything we can understand now. Certainly quite different from anything that you intend, Henry. It is the same with a poem or with a novel.” Wallis thought he saw a face at a ground-floor window, and he was startled for a moment. “The final effect it has upon the world can never be anticipated or measured or arranged.” Meredith was looking across at the turbulent surface of the water. “That is what I mean by its reality.” (Ackroyd 1993, 101 emphasis added)

By the “effect” or “reality” of the painting is meant the meaning of the portrait. When the meaning changes, reality changes too. Consequently, as the comment implies, realism’s attempt to present a final meaning represented in Wallis’s act and ideas are questioned. On the other hand, modernism’s penchant for depicting the world as absurd and meaningless is also challenged. As Meredith observes, any work of art conveys meaning; however, its meaning is not fixed and final but constructed and may undergo changes over time. In effect, the meaning is determined by the artistic strategies and techniques by which the work is created. Meredith says, “[t]hese visible things are stage props, mere machinery” (87). When Wallis “watched that absolute white drying slowly on the canvas he could already

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see ‘Chatterton’ as a final union of light and shadow” (102). Consequently, the portrait’s meaning representing Chatterton is not a final product but the creation of him by “light” and “shadow.” That is, he is being created, made by artistic manipulation of colours. His representation in the painting is not a result of imitation of an external reality but is created by artistic techniques. Therefore, any meaning it may convey is a construct, made in the process of artistic creation. Once more Ackroyd self-reflexively comments upon how meaning is created in the process of creation. The detailed description of the painting, revealing the ways in which colours influence the painting, is highly self-reflexive. It gives a comment upon the ways through which the meaning of a work of art, including Chatterton, takes shape. Wallis’s description of his painting self-reflexively lays bare his devices. It is also a commentary upon how meaning is constructed through artistic techniques: When I have finished the drawing I will need to saturate it with water, and then I can use a grey tint to block in the shade. After that I put on my colour and allow it to dry: when it is firm, I can use a hair pencil for all the details. As for the lights–” “Out, damned light!” Meredith was staring at the ceiling once more. “–As for the lights, I need only touch the drawing with water and then rub it with a little piece of bread. That is my method, at least.” (88 emphasis added)

As the term “method” self-reflexively signifies, the passage tells rather than shows. Indeed, metafictionists, including Ackroyd, constantly expose the methods and strategies by which their works are constructed. the narrator’s comments upon Wallis’s act of making artwork also self-reflexively reveals the devices. The narrator observes that: “[h]ere, at the still point of the composition, the rich glow of the poet’s clothes and the brightness of his hair would be the emblem of a soul that had not yet left the body; that had not yet fled, through the open window of the garret, into the cool distance of the painted sky” (103). Ackroyd reveals how this meaning–that Chatterton is still alive spending the last moments of his life–is reproduced by artistic techniques from Chatterton’s clothes to the hair’s colour. Art imitates reality; indeed, reality is made artistically. The setting gives the

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impression that Chatterton is going to die soon. It augments the idea and meaning of suicide. Moreover, as pointed to in the previous chapter, the portrait Charles possesses bears multiple meanings all contracted by artistic techniques. It comes to stand for the act of representation itself. It also represents Chatterton. In addition, as Edward realises, the portrait reflects the image of his father, Charles as well as Chatterton (145). It further comes to symbolise the death of the author which is enhanced by the death of the major characters in the novel. References are made to the idea. Meredith touches upon the same issue by asking “[w]hen you buy something, when it is your own, does it acquire a deeper reality?’” (97). He is referring to the conditions under which meaning is exposed to change. Does meaning change when the proprietor changes is a question he is raising. However, this death in the portrait is not just a physical one. It bothers Mrs. Leno from the beginning, for she can see “death on that face” (7). Mrs. Leno is the owner of the portrait. This fear more broadly symbolises the fear of artists having no control over their works and not being able to impose ultimate meaning upon them any longer. It suggests multiplicity of interpretations which bothers the realist reader and/or author. This is the death of the author/owner and consequently that of the final meaning imposed upon a work of art. This idea is clearly shown in the discussion between Philip and Charles over the manuscripts. Philip asks for the name of the man who possesses them to which Charles replies, “[n]obody can own the past” (36). No one has control over the meaning of the past. Similarly, no one can impose an ultimate meaning upon the past. In the same vein, the portrait has multiple meanings. Its final destruction is of symbolic significance, representing the destruction of any final meaning. As discussed in Chapter Two, in historiographic metafiction the existence of meaning is not rejected as is in modernism. What metafictionists aim at is to demonstrate how a single event may come to stand for a fact as best expressed in Philips words: “‘[e]vents which are tragedies for us . . . are just changes for them’” (135). This statement can be applied to Chatterton in the novel in that his death may be regarded as a suicide, as in faking his own death, or as an unintentional accident. Consequently, reality–the meaning we grant to an event–is something we make, create and construct for many purposes. Harriet says, “that’s the

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trouble with history. It’s the one thing we have to make up for ourselves” (143). Just as Chatterton made up the past by inventing a medieval poet and influencing a whole generation as reflected in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” and Keats’s “Endymion.” In Meredith’s words Chatterton “invented an entire period and made its imagination his own: no one had properly understood the medieval world until Chatterton summoned it into existence” (98); just as Wallis made his version of Chatterton’s death; just as Joynson fabricated the documents and Chatterton’s confession to give the impression that Chatterton’s death was accidental; finally, just as Ackroyd did the whole novel with its multiple narratives. They do so by explicitly drawing the reader’s attention to the meaning-granting process. Ackroyd has created his own version of Chatterton. The revelation of Chatterton’s method of faking the Rowley poems (52) illustrates Ackroyd’s literary style and how meaning is constructed in the process of narration in general. Hence, the ways through which we grant meaning to historical events are made clear. Even when read as a suicide, Chatterton’s death assumes two contradictory meanings. One is generally condemned as an indication of weakness. The other raises Romantic poets’ acclaim who call it a glorious act. For them, Chatterton was an emblem of individuality who stepped beyond limitations, a marvellous boy who acted like an outcast, an idea expressed in “Romantic Suicide: The Chatterton Myth and its Sequels.” According to the Romantics, his suicide was not regarded as negative and humiliating but glorious, courageous, a Promethean act. It was considered as “a symbol of a fearless spirit that triumphed over death and was somehow conceived as a victory of the individual against adversity” (Friend 124). This becomes a topic of discussion between Harriet and Sarah. Harriet asks, “‘[a]nd so the dead can be exalted by others feigning death?’” Sarah replies “‘[t]he whole point of death is that it can be made beautiful. And the real thing is never very pretty. Think of Chatterton–’” (21). Death as an unpleasant issue can be made pleasant through art as in the case of Chatterton. His suicide occurs as a result of his society. Ackroyd brings him into a new focus and de-marginalises him in a sense. Chatterton’s suicide accordingly becomes popular, turning into an ideology dominant in the Romantic period. During the time, suicide was regarded as a rebellious act

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of an outlaw. It was an emblem of the freedom of an individual, not a rational man of the Enlightenment, who is no longer curbed by limitations. Consequently, in this sense, Chatterton is viewed as a Romantic outcast. Meaning as a process rather than a construct is evident in Wallis’s description of his artwork, Chatterton’s exposition of his fakery in the letter to his mother discussed in the previous chapter and Merk’s dissection of the portrait. All three examples show the diegetic aspect of the novel and highlight the processes through which they use certain artistic techniques to create certain effects–meanings. For instance, Chatterton’s exposition in the letter is Ackroyd’s own artistic fabrication. It is a fictive Chatterton. Therefore, Chatterton’s words can represent and expose the strategies and techniques of the novel. It highlights the narrative as a meaning-granting process. In so doing, it comments upon how meaning in an historical or literary narrative may be created and given to it. Merk takes some pictures of the portrait. As the narrator points out, “each photograph would, in turn, help him to reconstruct the painting” (144). In effect, the novel is a dissection of the realist novel’s strategies and methods of feigning and fabricating reality and consequently meaning. This is true of the notion of forgery. Chatterton is described as “the greatest literary forger of all time” (Ackroyd 1993, 13). The usual meaning of fakery which has a negative connotation here acquires positive as well as negative connotations. Joynson wants Chatterton to imitate dead poets. Chatterton’s impression is negative. Joynson says, “‘I did not say Forge. Is the work of Rowley a forgery?’” (56). Joynson’s point is that just as the Rowley poems are regarded as genuine and original, this is an act of creation, not forgery. Ackroyd has made a deliberate use and misuse of an incident by offering different narratives and perspectives in the novel to divulge into the reader that what we may assume as objective reality also have different contradictory meanings throughout history. Consequently, we come to know the past through the text and our representations. In addition, the text and meanings it may offer are not products but actually made in the process of narration as well as reading; hence, history–reality and meaning by implication–is what we make in a process, not an objective fact given to us. To sum up, firstly the novel breaks the binaries including the one between life and fiction, originality and copying, art and criticism, history

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and fiction and form and content. This problematises the antirepresentationality of art. Secondly, it also demonstrates that a literary work is not a product, as implied in literary realism, but a process through which reality and consequently meaning are created through artistic techniques and strategies. Finally, it reflects how the portrait and death of Chatterton assume different meanings through the process of fiction-making. The novel in the vein of metafiction draws the reader’s attention to its own process of creation. It does so self-reflexively and self-consciously by revealing the devices both at the level of subject matter and structure. This problematises the realist view of art as a product.

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION This book concerns the problematisation of the representation of reality in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton. A postmodernist reading of the work is carried out with a focus upon narrative strategies and techniques that make the problematisation of representation and anti-representation possible. Consequently, Chapter Two was devoted to postmodern criticism and theory. It also presented an introduction to postmodern criticism defining and discussing the notion of postmodernism in terms of history, theory and literature. This was followed by a new poetics emphasising Hutcheon’s theories. In the next section, postmodernist re-presentation in the light of postmodern theory was discussed and defined to account for historiographic metafiction’s characteristics. Next, how the view came to be put into question was discussed. The following section was devoted to the discussion of postmodernist re-presentation as opposed to the representational and anti-representational views. It was discussed that postmodernist re-presentation questions both views by suggesting itself as both representational and anti-representational. As mentioned, this type of representation is best shown in metafiction, especially historiographic metafiction. It attempts to confront the past with the present and modernist self-reflexivity. It merges boundaries and questions binary oppositions between the past and the present as well as life and art. The aim of postmodernist re-presentation is to highlight that “there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct” (Hutcheon 1988, 13 emphasis added). Therefore, we have come to a point where no centre remains unturned. Postmodernist metafiction was also discussed in this chapter, as well as how the postmodern mode grants meaning to events. The next section was dedicated to historiographic metafiction which sees history as hybrid, contradictory and heterogeneous. It was revealed that historiographic metafiction juxtaposes the historical with the

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fictive to question the idea of reality and history as monolithic, unified and coherent. It illuminates that meaning is constructed and given to an event through narrative techniques and strategies or to use White’s terminology “emplotment,” that is, the arrangement of incidents in the narrative. The final section in Chapter Two was dedicated to narrative techniques and strategies in problematisation of representation. It was discussed that metafictionists in the manner of Russian Formalists try to lay bare narrative strategies and techniques. Then, the term post-formalism was suggested for metafictionists’ concern with and focus upon form and for their deconstructist perspective. As explored, metafictionists also argue that the literary work is an artefact, made by its creator. Afterward, the chapter focused mainly upon the issue of parody, particularly its contribution to the problematisation of the representation of reality. Chapter Three was dedicated to the application of postmodern theory discussed in Chapter Two to Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton. In the first section, the problematisation of the representation of reality and historiography was discussed. This was followed by the novel’s function as a parody of history and historiography which was investigated and revealed regarding Charles’s exploration of the portrait and Chatterton’s documents. It was revealed and discussed how their representational possibility is questioned and the idea of history as imitation-with-distortion is suggested. The idea is also manifest in Sarah’s exploration of images of death throughout history. Then, it was discussed how paratexts contribute to the problematisation of representation by establishing real historical information to be dismantled later on, as shown in the case of Chatterton’s biographical account at the beginning of the story. In addition, the ways in which historiographers make the illusion of historical authenticity were selfreflexively exposed in Chatterton’s revealing his own devices. Also, I explicated that three contradictory versions of Chatterton’s death are presented in the novel to extend the problematisation of the representation of reality. The text provides plausible justifications for each narrative. Nevertheless, the three narratives are put under erasure, a central narrative strategy in the novel, leading to the problematisation of their representationality. Following this section, I delineated Ackroyd’s use of the technique of mise en abyme as a narrative strategy in problematisation

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of representation. The symbolic signification of the setting as a narrative strategy implying similarity and difference was also expounded. In the second part of Chapter Three, the problematisation of the representation of reality in literary realism with regard to narrative techniques and strategies was illustrated. It was expounded that the novel creates a heterocosm which simultaneously refers to the outside world and to itself. Then, narrative strategies including mise en abyme, parallelism and self-reflexivity were delineated. I argued that Philip’s book is a best case of mise en abyme in the problematisation of representation. As it was expounded, parallelism instead of narrating based upon chronological order is used in the novel to problematise the cause-and-effect pattern of literary realism and historiography. The parallel relations between the three major characters were also explained. Moreover, literary realism’s reliance upon the third person omniscient point of view is highly questioned by Chatterton’s offering multiple points of view which constantly contradict each other. The delineation on how self-reflexivity challenges the impersonality and objectivity of literary realism to suggest that meaning is constructed in the process of writing concluded this chapter. Chapter Four was dedicated to the novel’s blurring of boundaries. The problematisation of modernism’s and the avant-garde’s antirepresentationality was first discussed. As declared, the novel is not totally anti-representational. In effect, it problematises the idea of antirepresentationality as highly supported in modernism, especially by the avant-garde, by blurring the boundary between reality and art. It is, instead, both representational and anti-representational. As discussed, the novel’s conflation of the historical and the fictive through paratexts creates the problematisation, for it refers to the external reality whilst being still autoreferential. As opposed to modernism, the novel asserts its possible referentiality. The portrait suggests the possibility of artistic representationality, for it is possible to echo and stand for the outside figures as Edward can see. For Edward, the portrait stands for his father. In addition, the portrait’s ability to immortalise is an indication of the possibility of artistic representation. The same idea is pointed out in the discussion between Meredith and Wallis upon the issue of immortality. It was also demonstrated that this is in contravention of modernism’s craving for meaninglessness, for the portrait Wallis is painting does represent somebody. It does have

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meaning. Hence, I argued that the novel does not reject the existence of reality and meaning, but reveals that they are constructed. In this chapter, I explored how the novel blurs the conventional boundaries which imply binary oppositions. I expanded upon how modernist anti-representationality is problematised by demonstrating the novel’s possibility of representation. I demonstrated that the novel offers the possibility of artistic representation of reality at the level of structure and subject matter. The next section was devoted to the novel’s obsession with meaning as constructed in the process of construction as opposed to literary realism’s vocation for declaring meaning as a product. I argued that the novel also challenges modernism and modernist avant-garde’s meaninglessness of art and the world. Then, the boundary between originality and copying was discussed. As Philip observes, stories are limited, but one can say them in different forms. In effect, putting old things in new ways problematises modernism’s originality and innovation. I delineated the ways in which the novel was influenced by other works and is still original. I also discussed that how the novel’s parodic allusions to and reliance upon, the previous works of arts question the idea of originality by exposing the style of the artists in the novel, as well as that of Chatterton and Ackroyd. Blurring the boundaries between art and criticism was also discussed. It is manifest in the overt discussions of art and literature amongst the characters. I also pointed out that boundaries between history and fiction as well as form and content are blurred in the novel leading to the problematisation of anti-representationality. In the final section, I examined the idea of meaning as constructed in the process of narrating as opposed to realism which postulates meaning as a product. The portrait’s multiplicity of meaning was discussed. The novel suggests that it takes different meanings through the passage of time. I also explained how Chatterton’s death as a singular event acquires three contradictory meanings simultaneously. As mentioned, even as a suicide it can bear two opposite meanings. Furthermore, the idea of meaning as constructed in the process of writing is evident in Wallis’s description of his artwork, Chatterton’s exposition of his fakery in the letter to her mother discussed in the previous chapter and Merk’s dissection of the portrait. Therefore, the novel questions realism’s idea that postulates the work of art

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and its meaning as products by exposing the process through which they are constructed. This book brings to light numerous findings and achievements in the realms of literature and literary criticism. Firstly, the novel makes references to the outside world whilst aiming at anti-representationality at the same time. In effect, its referentiality is established through fictive referents; hence, problematisation, not rejection, of representation and antirepresentation. It questions the representational view of art by selfreflexively focusing upon its own process of creation. Indeed, realism’s representational view of art is highly questioned. Furthermore, unlike modernism and especially the avant-garde which announce the total separation of the work from the external reality, Chatterton problematises the view by creating a heterocosm. That is, any reference in the novel to other works including Eliot’s, to the external reality such as Chatterton’s life and death and to philosophical and literary theories including MeredithWallis’s discussion of art and mimesis marks the representationality of the novel. Moreover, contrary to the avant-garde’s notions of originality, innovation and creativity, the novel highly questions them by making references to the external reality and copying others’ styles and narrative strategies to make a new work and to still be creative. Accordingly, the novel creates a heterocosmic world and is hetero-referential, that is, it is representational while simultaneously questions its representationality and aims at self-referentiality. This can lead to the second significant implication: the representational and anti-representational views of literature are fallacious. As the novel reveals, the real/unreal binary opposition as a metaphorical yardstick for evaluating a work of art is fallacious. In other words, the idea that reality is an adequate touchstone for art is irrelevant. Therefore, just as relating the text’s meaning to the author’s intention is false and, as the novel attempts to point out, to assess or evaluate a work of art by the degree it represents reality, as in realism, or it breaks away from reality, as in the avant-garde, is fallacious. Thirdly, unlike poststructuralism that relates the uncertain state of affairs in a text to the nature of language–language as inherently unreliable– the novel as a type of metafiction takes on a deconstructist-formalist perspective. Chatterton draws upon narrative strategies and techniques for

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such hybrid, self-reflexive, self-contradictory and double-edged state of affairs to indicate the unreliable nature of language. Parody together with other narrative techniques including paratextuality, under erasure, mise en abyme and parallelism plays a central role. This marks the difference between postmodernist metafiction and deconstruction which is discussed in the next paragraph. Reading is active rather than passive. The above is closely related to the study’s fourth important finding which was previously underexplored in postmodern literary scholarship. Postmodernist historiographic metafiction requires a new poetics that can account for its mode of representation whose representationality and antirepresentationality are acquired through narrative strategies and techniques. Far beyond poststructuralists and deconstructists’ linguistic obsessions and proposed strategy of reading that focuses solely upon the text, historiographic metafiction draws parallels between the reader, the text and the author. This is made possible by the self-reflexive and self-conscious conflation of the historical and the fictive. Consequently, the discussion of reality and historiography plays an important role which merits a treatment far beyond deconstruction’s linguistic obsessions. Therefore, in this book I have applied this new poetics to the novel. Fifthly, the novel presents reality and meaning as constructs. As opposed to realism that postulates the existence of reality as transparent, the novel asserts that reality and meaning are constructed in the process of creation. Wallis’s description of his techniques used in the portrait, Merk’s dissection of the portrait and Chatterton’s exposition of his style and method of writing are indications of metafiction’s emphasis upon the idea that a work of art is a process and that meaning is constructed in this creative process. Unlike modernism that nostalgically laments the loss of meaning and reality, the novel as a historiographic metafiction demonstrates and corroborates the existence of reality and meaning. However, it exposes that they are human constructs created in the process of narration by the use of narrative strategies and techniques. Consequently, the novel is not a final product but an ongoing process through which meaning is constructed to be deconstructed. Closely related to the discussion of reality and meaning is the idea of history as a construct. As the novel demonstrates, historical facts are indeed constructed out of historical events. Historiographic metafiction

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confirms the existence of historical incidents; it, nonetheless, asserts that historical facts are human constructs. In other words, historiographers give meaning to an historical incident by the ways through which they narrate it. This meaning-granting process is highly emphasised in the novel by offering three different, contradictory versions of a single event: the death of Thomas Chatterton. That is, a fact is an event plus the meaning we grant to it by the way it is narrated. Therefore, the idea of history as monolithic, transparent and homogenous is seriously questioned. I would like to make some suggestions for scholars of the novel and students of literature who are interested in further exploring Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton. The novel could be analysed in the light of other literary critical approaches and strategies of reading. Herein, I will refer to the most applicable literary approaches which are thought to breed results and shed new light upon the novel. The novel can be read against the death of the author debate as expressed in Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and in Foucault’s “What is an Author.” Death is a leitmotif in the novel and reflected and prevalent in the life of the major characters, their discussions and actions. It is also evident in artistic forms including Chatterton’s poetry and the portrait. The destruction of the portrait can symbolically stand for the death of the author. On the other hand, the idea of the proprietor of a work of art as being in control of its meaning is highly questioned in the novel reflected in the documents and autobiography attributed to Chatterton and the portrait Wallis paints. It is also manifest in the professional relation amongst the characters. For instance, Charles is asked to ghost-write Harriet Scrope. Most of the works of art in the novel which are generally attributed to certain writers and artists are in fact done by others. The fictional construction of Barthes’s concept of “modern scriptor,” rather than the author in whose hands lies the power and meaning, can be explored in this light. Next, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism are also fertile grounds for future literary analyses. Since history and historiography is central to the novel, one can apply the two approaches. New Historicists and Cultural Materialists contend that history is not monolithic. Ackroyd’s novel also suggests this by dismantling Historicist and realist views of history as coherent, monolithic, unified and chronological. Chatterton questions the reader’s pre-conceptions about history and the novel’s

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constant references to the historical provide grounds for undermining its artistic autonomy. New Historicists similarly view the work of art as a discourse, with certain ideologies, which is culturally constructed. In the vein of the novel, it also brings marginalised voices in history into greater focus. Therefore, the views can be applicable to the novel. Moreover, a Foucauldian analysis of the novel is equally appropriate. Foucault’s idea of power relations can be best applied to the novel, such as imposing meaning as an act of power. In addition, since meaning-granting has ideological implications, knowing about the power structures and how they work in a discourse to produce historical meaning are required. In this light, Hutcheon’s ideas could highly be illuminating. Recalling Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, she points out the new meaning of ideology as a process in which meaning is constructed. Accordingly, a similar analysis of history and the ways through which meaning is constructed can be applied to the novel. In addition, the historical survey of power relations between the text, the reader and the author in literary criticism reveals the privileging of one at the cost of the suppression of the two others. On the contrary, the novel aims at making a parallel relation between them by being both representational and autonomous. Another approach to the text could be a deconstructist strategy of reading specifically in terms of semiotics. Study of signs from a deconstructist angle is applicable to the signs in the novel. For instance, the portrait and its slippery meanings can be analysed in this light. Moreover, the leitmotif and the image of death in the novel which acquires different meanings would be helpful. Since the novel is a postmodernist fiction, almost all the notions and signs are already self-contradictory and deconstructed. Consequently, a poststructuralist deconstructist perspective is applicable. Moreover, analysing the novel in the light of Marxist and New Marxist approaches would be tenable. The notion of proprietor as having a central influence upon the meaning of a work of art is emphasised in the novel. One can bear in the mind that Chatterton, Charles and Meredith are all artists suffering from poverty to the brink of committing suicide. Therefore, the relation between the economic status and death can also be explored. In addition, scholars could discuss how economic ideology functions through literary discourse.

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Also, the application of Reader-Response theory and Phenomenological approach to the novel could be highly fruitful, for the novel is a text of, to use Wolfgang Iser’s terms, maximal indeterminacy. This active role of the reader, or the revival of the reader’s role, in the act of reading is also pointed out by Hutcheon in Narcissistic Narrative. As opposed to the passive role of the reader in the realist novel and to structuralism and poststructuralism’s emphasis upon the text, metafiction brings readers into a new focus and invites them to be actively involved in the novel’s process of construction. Creating a high degree of indeterminacy, the novel provides the reader with stars the constellation of which can be drawn by the reader. Therefore, Reader-Response theory and Phenomenological approach can be applicable. However, bringing all the said approaches into consideration would have been impossible due to the scope of this study. Consequently, the study has endeavored to best illuminate significant aspects of the novel, which have been overlooked, that problematise the ideas of representationality and anti-representationality of art. It has done so by relying upon postmodern theory which, to the researcher, is regarded as the best strategy of reading Chatterton with regard to the idea of the problematisation of the representation of reality in terms of narrative techniques and strategies. Finally, I suggest the reading of the novel with a focus upon the concept of voice and ventriloquism. Readers might be interested in examination of Chatterton by drawing upon theories in medical humanities which elucidate. Thomas Chatterton fakes and composes poetry by adopting the voice and identity of a medieval monk. Charles is a ghost writer who writes for Harriet. Henry Wallis paints “The Death of Chatterton” (1856) as an eighteenth-century painter. George Meredith embodies the substantialised voice of Thomas Chatterton’s death. Given that the major characters in the novel are imposters, Steven Connor’s works on voice including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000) could be a starting point for a better understanding of how writers turn disembodied voices into palpable characters and a work of art. Also, Patricia Waugh’s “The Art of Medicine: The Novelist as Voice Hearer” (2015) provides a novel angle in contemporary literary criticism by bringing the humanities and medicine together. The contemporary concept of authorship is worth exploration in further details. As I have put it elsewhere, contemporary authorship

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“suggests that the author’s function is complex and dialectical, exercising a negative capability in externalising the inner voices that are already internalisations of the afflictions, horrors and traumas of the external world” (Aryan 2020, 210). In that light, Chatterton can be read against the author’s ability to embody and characterise the voices of his memory.

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