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Around the late 1960s there was much talk of “the death of the novel” or, as the American author John Barth described it, a “literature of exhaustion”. At this point the traditional techniques of fiction, an omniscient, omnipresent dependable author telling of characters whose behaviour and motivations could be rationally explained, and of a cause and effect chain of events that follow each other chronologically, suddenly seemed obsolete or irrelevant. These conventions reflected and promoted belief in a universally experienced, understandable and explicable world whereas the complexities of the modern age were impossible to capture in a conventionally “realist” style. On the other hand the more “experimental” or Avant garde modernist ways of writing, of presenting the reality through fallible, multiple points of view, or discontinuously as a subjective experience in which reality, perception and consciousness get caught up in each other, seemed either elitist, burned out or pointless. Writers of this period therefore faced a dilemma: to find a new voice appropriate to the era of mass communications on the one hand and to appeal to a postmodern readership without resorting to narrative clichés such as logical sequence of events, neat endings, cause and effect explanations, on the other. There was also a feeling that all good ideas had been exhausted by the great modernists like James Joyce, Proust or Kafkawho now, in their turn, seemed hackneyed and outdated. This mood of exhaustion was a common feature of postmodernism as it was formulated into the 1970s and 80s. In “The literature of Exhaustion” John Barth noted that in the postmodern era, when the ideas of progress and innovation had obviously withered, only creativity according to Borges’s recipes would be possible in the forms of sophistic games with tradition—that is citations, allusions,travesties,plagiarism, and parody of everything that has been written.Another tactic of dealing with this problem was pastiche. It may not be possible to make brand new heroic statements, it was argued, but you can at least take existing forms apart and re-combine the pieces in enterprising ways. The postmodern text is openly combined from different genres and styles. Eclecticism is also a related practice that involves openness to a wide range of forms and devices. While it is impossible simply to invent a new style, it is equally impossible to avoid having a style as writers are always working within pre-existing cultural languages and conventions. Eclecticism means throwing these together and coming out with a different combination. For artists in this vein all literature is to be plundered as “purity” is not a virtue for postmodernists but rather welcoming the “plurality” of contemporary cultural life with open arms. Paradoxical as it may seem, the postmodernists are closer to the neoclassical practice of rewriting, the Greco-Roman models in their case, even though their reasons for it are widely different from those of the neoclassic than the Romantics who abandoned the aesthetic doctrine of imitation of the ancient models in favour of an aesthetics of originality, spontaneity and inspiration.The postmodern prevalence of rewriting as a technique of composition has prompted some scholars of contemporary literature to redefine parody, quotation and intertextuality and made the parodic mode the most salient feature of cutting edge postmodern literature. Linda Hutcheon in her A Theory of Parody, proposes that parody “is an imitation with critical ironic distance” in which the irony “can cut both ways” (Hutcheon 37), that is be directed at once towards the text that is the target of the parody and towards the parody itself. The parodist may be seen as staging a “confrontation” between his or her text and one or more of the canonical texts but in this confrontation no text is allowed “to fare any better or worse than the other”. It is “the fact that they differ that parody emphasises and indeed dramatizes” (Hutcheon 31). While parody is one of the main genres of rewriting, quotation is its simplest form and has played a very large role in postmodern literature, so much so that many critics have seen postmodernism as practicing “an aesthetics of quotations”.Quotation, which is always a textual transformation through re-contextualisation, can take numerous forms and in postmodernist texts is the object of a large variety of manipulations- it can be deliberately deformed, switched from the affirmative mode to negative and vice-versa, falsely attributed, concealed, made unrecognisable, used as a screen for another quotation, as a clue or false clue to the meaning of the text and so on for most diverse purposes. A postmodern masterpiece of extensive quotation from a single work, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.The postmodern novel is concerned with being fiction and with being about fiction. It uses metafictional devices to suggest that novels are just one kind of fiction among countless others, none of which can adequately express the complexities of contemporary experience by itself. A novel can be defined as metafictional when it openly demonstrates its constructed-ness and connection with another novel. As defined by Patricia Waugh in her Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (2009), a work of this kind knowingly lays bare the conventions of fiction, and draws attention to the language(s) and literary styles it uses. In short it is a fiction about fiction. Examples mentioned by Waugh include The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five and John Irving’sThe World According to Garp. These writers work within the tradition of the novel as an art form, but do so with a critical, ironic awareness of that tradition. According to Waugh, they aim ‘simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction (1)”.In this way postmodernist metafiction questions realism from within; it does not offer transparent windows on the world, slices of life or illusions of authenticity. By drawing attention to its own status as an artefact, it admits that it can offer no objective, complete or universally valid representations. A central feature of postmodern literary forms is the interrogation of their own conditions of existence. Postmodern fiction discusses the process of language while using a language; it talks about genre while being part of a genre. While presenting us with stories, it also asks us to consider what stories are made of. Linda Hutcheon calls this the “contradictory enterprise” of postmodernism that “manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge”. Its art forms use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention so that “the effect is to highlight or ‘highlight’ and subvert or to ‘subvert’” (Hutcheon, “Politics of Postmodernism” 1-2).Together with textual strategies like auto referentiality and metafiction, intertextuality which may be provisionally defined as reference to previous texts, has come to be considered as “the very trademark of postmodernism….postmodernism and intertextuality are treated as synonymous these days” (Pfister 209).The birth of the theory of intertextuality parallels chronologically the appearance of postmodernism as Kristeva’s essay on Bakhtin “Bakhtin, le mot, le dialogue et le roman” which introduced the concept of intertextuality and John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion”, a promotion of postmodernist metafiction came out almost simultaneously in 1967 (Pfister 208). Pfister asserts the linkage of postmodernism and intertextuality as “Postmodernist intertextuality is the intertextuality conceived and realised within the framework of poststructuralist theory of intertextuality” (214), thus emphasising the interdependence of the two terms. Intertextuality, however, is a much older phenomenon than postmodernism, to be found in literature of all ages, and most of the forms of intertextuality—which include imitation, parody, travesty, translation, adaptation, quotation and allusion—have existed ever since antiquity. Admittedly there are some epochs which produced a more highly intertextual literature than the others, and intertextuality might well be called a hallmark of Renaissance and Baroque literature but not of Romanticism and nineteenth century realism. And yet there is something new about the postmodernist intertextuality: it differs not only in its high frequency of appearance from the previous ages but it also serves new functions, and it is connected with a different concept of literature. Earlier forms of intertextuality can clearly be distinguished from the forms prevailing in postmodernist and radically experimental texts. The communication process underlying earlier forms of intertextuality may well be described in the following manner: “an author refers to other texts within his own text expecting his readers to understand these references as part of the strategyof his text; and the ideal reader does not only understand these references but is also aware of the fact that the author is aware of their presence within his text as well as of the readers’ awareness of them” (Broich120). This form of intertextuality will therefore, as a rule, be intended and marked and it is held to be different from influence as well as plagiarism.Postmodernist critics and authors have, however, used the term intertextuality in a radically different manner. It is the postmodernists who first coined and employed the term and it was only later that the term was taken over by critics who were sceptical of the broad application of the postmodernist concept of intertextuality and therefore tried to develop alternative concepts like the one quoted above in order to be able to describe the relationship between earlier texts and their pre-texts.When Julia Kristeva first coined and defined the term intertextuality in the late 1960s it was part of an attempt at deflecting the focus of literary criticism away from the traditional subject, i.e. the autonomous text. Intertextuality, then, was intended to provide a new critical meta-language and a new approach to literature, whereby the semantic mechanisms veered away from the author/source to the collective modes of discourse.The postmodern concept of intertextuality was introduced by Julia Kristeva in her discussion of the ideas of Bakhtin, referring to the way the texts relate to one another. Though Bakhtin is one of its source thinkers, Julia Kristeva is generally credited with having coined the term “intertextualite” in French. Disputing the autonomous nature of a literary text, she writes that it is “the transportation of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position.” She points out that:Every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; every text is an absorption and a transformation of another text. Thus the term “intersubjectivity” is replaced by the term “intertextuality” and the language of poetry has to be read, at the least, as double. (Kristeva, Desire in Language146)Roland Barthes, the French critical theorist associated with structuralism, semiotics and poststructuralism, characterises every literary work as a “chambred’échos” a chamber in which echoes of other literary works are endlessly reflected, in another classic passage (Barthes,“The Pleasures of the Text” 78), and in his book, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969, first published in English in 1972), MichaelFoucalt writes:The frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first line and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration….it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences…..The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands….its unity is variable and relative. (Foucalt 23)Barthes borrows the term intertextuality to refer to the condition of texts referred to by Foucalt. Philip Thody points out that for Kristeva and the other critics who grouped themselves in the 1960 and 70s around a review called “Tel Quel”, all “literature consists of texts and all texts are reflections or reproductions of different versions of other pre-existing texts” (Thody 86). Harold Bloom writes:Poems are not things but only words that refer to other words and those words refer to still other words and so on into the densely overpopulated world of literary language. Any poem is an inter-poem and any reading of a poem is inter-reading. (Bloom, Poetry and Repression 2)In A Map of Misreading Bloom claims “that there are no texts but only relationships between texts” (3) A text is thus the transformation of another. Even within a single text there can be a continual “dialogue” between the text given and other texts. A text can literally wind itself upon a previous text, reinforcing it, giving it an entirely new context. Lodge calls intertextuality the “history of appropriations, reworking and imitation of someone else’s property-another’s language, another’s style, another’s words” (Lodge 146). There is no master text but a library of simultaneous texts and one text echoes another or is linked to other texts by direct quotation, allusion, dialogue or even confrontation.All the critics under discussion regard their statements on the nature of the text as ontological, that is, as referring to all texts of all times. It becomes clear that these critics have formulated a radically new concept of the text for which they have created memorable images—“the mosaic of texts”, “the chamber of echoes” et cetera. Yet another image for this concept of the text is that of palimpsest, a manuscript page or papyrus which has been washed clean or erased and can be used for a new text, introduced by Gerard Genette in his Palimpsestes (1982). He uses the term “transtextualisation” to denote this, what he calls, “transposition” of one text into another. He calls the text that is transformed “transtextualised hypo text” and the text that results from the transformation or transposition “hypertext” thus leading to the new concept of hypertextuality.Thus there is no longer such a thing as writings, there are only rewritings which reorganise previous cultural discourses and it is the function of intertextuality to analyse the relationships between the new text and the old codes as Thais Morgan aptly summarises in his article “The Space of Intertextuality”:As a structural analysis of texts in relation to the larger system of signifying practices or uses of signs in culture, intertextuality seems by definition to deliver us from old controversies over the psychology of the individual authors and readers, the tracing of literary origins, and the relative value of imitation and or originality. By shifting our attention from the triangle author/work/tradition to that of text/discourse/culture, intertextuality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structural or synchronic model of literature as sign system. The most salient effect of this strategic change is to free the literary text from psychological, sociological, and historical determinisms, opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships with other texts. (Morgan 239)The problem is that these relations tend to be of two types: a relation of subversion in varying degrees and with various agenda, or a relation ofretrieval with no revisionist purport. In Valentine Cunningham’s words, intertextuality is either a “grudge-match, a wrestling of the poetic father into submission so the newcomer can become himself on his terms or a redeployment of past modes, a rearranging of usefully handed-on pointers and material. It can be a fishing in the poetic gene pool just as much as a scene of Oedipal bloodletting” (141-142).It becomes evident that this concept of intertextuality is central to a postmodernist understanding of literature when we realise how closely it is connected with other postmodernist concepts and with the strategies and devices which have been regarded as the typical characteristics of postmodernism, such as the death of the author, the emancipation of the reader, the end of mimesis and self-referentiality, regress, fragmentation and so on resulting in a literature of what has been called the literature of plagiarism.It has been argued that a literary work which is no longer an original creation but a blending of innumerable echoes from other texts can no longer have an author in the traditional sense; hence the famous proclamation of “death of the author” by Foucalt (1963). In 1968 Roland Barthes published an article “The Death of the Author” in a Parisian literary journal causing a few ripples in the continental literary theory, but its publication in a collection of Barthes’s essays entitled Image-Music-Text in 1977(translated and edited by Stephen Heath) brought it to a much larger audience and triggered a tidal wave of comment. It very quickly became something of a canonical piece, widely quoted in books of literary theory. It is still regularly cited as an important early statement of the postmodernist sensibility.Barthes argues that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of death of the author. According to earlier concepts of literature a literary work has only one meaning which can be either found or missed by the reader. If the references to other texts are part of its meaning, as in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, these intertextual references are as a rule intended and marked. In a literary work conceived as an echo chamber however, there is no privileged meaning and no privileged intertextual relations. This liberates the reader into reading his own meaning from or into the text, into following some of the intertextual echoes of the text while ignoring others and at the same time also bringing in his own associations with other texts. A postmodernist text is no longer meant to have closure, homogeneity and unity; contemporary writers rather tend to create “open”, polyphonous and fragmented texts. A typical example of a literary text which to a large extent is composed of elements from heterogeneous texts is Stoppard’s play Travesties (1975), “a mosaic of quotations”, the parts of which come from Joyce’s Ulysses, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Dadaist poems, memoirs, biographies, history books, limericks and many other sources.Postmodern literature tends to reject the idea of things having a single, absolute meaning. Instead it embraces fragmentation, discontinuity and conflict in matters of history, identity and culture. It is suspicious of any attempts to provide all encompassing, totalitarian theories and it rejects the view that any cultural phenomenon can be explained as the effect of one objectively existing fundamental cause.One of the most influential figures in this postmodern turn of thought against originals, centres and foundations is Jacques Derrida with his own particular poststructuralist blend of philosophy, linguistics and literary analysis in his theory of deconstruction. Derrida’s deconstructive work is very much a part of the project of questioning what we may call the meaning of meanings. It continues the structuralist task of looking for the conditions which allow texts to be meaningful and it shares their interest in the relationship between language and thought. However in common with the poststructuralists Derrida is much more concerned with how the meanings of texts can be plural and unstable rather than in fixing them to a rigid structure.The notion of language as iterable signals the impossibility of true interiority or a “private” space to which the other cannot gain access. If language, and here Derrida suggests all language, including the privileged system of speech, is iterable, i.e. repeatable with difference, it necessarily allows for alterity. In his Jacques Derrida: Live Theory, an exhaustive text which traces a concern with alterity throughout Derrida’s corpus, James Smith offers a useful synopsis of the ways in which Derrida’s The Postcard questions the possibility of a “private language”:“Envois” is a collection of notes, post cards, or love letters, sent to an anonymous lover; and yet here we have this private correspondence, published, for all to see. As we saw earlier, with this genre Derrida problematizes the public/private distinction – but in doing so, points to something fundamental about language: as soon as there is language, there is publicity, a way in which even intimate expressions put into language are necessarily inserted into public space, capable of being read by others, for such legibility (or “iterability”) is an essential feature of language. …In this sense, every missive is like a post card: lacking the privacy and (en)closure of an envelope, it can be read by just anyone, in very different contexts, and thus could generate an almost endless number of readings and speculations.(Smith 59)The iterability of language, then, holds that there is always an element of intersubjectivity at play, not only between the sender and the intended receiver, but also between the sender and innumerable other receivers with a vast number of different interpretations of the text.Alterity then is always already implicit in language, as it allows for the interpretation of another – an “other”. Derridian theory not only questions the possibility of an enclosed, private discourse in which the other is entirely excluded, but also the very concept of an enclosed subject or consciousness. In his Speech and Phenomena, Derrida offers a critique of the phonocentrism inherent in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Husserl makes a distinction between expression (signs which express or “mean” something) and indication (signs which do not express or “mean” anything), and suggests that true expression can only be found in ‘solitary mental life”. This retreat into interiority is based on the notion that indication is always implicit in communicative speech, which is based on an intersubjective relationship between sender and receiver. Derrida points to the impossibility of maintaining true interiority and self-presence and suggests that there is always a Verflechtung or entanglement between indication and expression. By conceding that a certain kind of speech occurs even in the insularity of the private sphere of consciousness, that “one of course speaks, in a certain sense, even in soliloquy”, Husserl necessarily allows for a certain alterity or intersubjectivity. The very public or communal nature of language and speech dictates that alterity can never be excluded, and therefore an entirely “solitary” consciousness can never be achieved. This notion is reiterated in one of Derrida’s later works, A Taste for the Secret. He suggests:The other is in me before me: the ego…implies alterity as its own condition. There is no “I” that ethically makes room for the other; but rather an “I” that is structured by the alterity within it, an “I” that itself in a state of self-deconstruction, of dislocation. (Derrida 84)For Derrida, the smooth surface of a text is an illusion created by the attempted suppression of internal contradictions.Deconstruction aims to dismantle this illusion. All texts work to create an illusion of coherence by inclusion and exclusion, by drawing firm lines to suggest continuity and avoiding conflict and diversity, by creating a centre and a margin. When Derrida deconstructs a text he goes for details that give away this process. He brings back into foreground the very things that the text claims it does not need. He looks for what he calls present absences or productive silences.He pushes into the centre themes, ideas, and values that the text tries to push to the margins and encourages the self-destruction of texts by playing on the inconsistencies and anxieties that lurk within them. Sometimes he analyses the footnotes of the book in more detail than the main thrust of the argument. Footnotes are bits of added information, little pieces of disagreement or possible contradictions that the author leaves on the margin. To let them into the main body of the text would upset the argument and so this is precisely what Derrida’s deconstruction does.Postmodernist literature has not only developed new intertextual strategies and devices but also specific functions which distinguish the intertextual literature of its time from that of earlier periods. As we have seen, Pope and Fielding were convinced that the imitation of other texts in a literary text stabilised its imitation of nature. Moreover, intertextuality in the Augustan age was also meant to legitimise a literary work and position it within an established literary genre. When Fielding imitated the epic he wanted to convince his readers that his work belonged to a legitimate genre. In Joseph Andrews (1741), one of the most intertextual novels of the eighteenth century, Fielding keeps referring to quite a number of pre-texts, Richardson’s Pamela, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the classic epic and the Bible. By linking his own characters with characters in the pre-texts Fielding wants to show his readers that he describes “not men but manners, not an individual but a species” (198). This is not disproved by the fact the references to Pamela are mainly parodic. Fielding indeed deconstructed Richardson’s concept of virtue but when developing his own concept of virtue he stabilised it by the references to Bible and various philosophers by showing that Joseph Andrews is similar to Joseph in the Old Testament and to the man who fell among the thieves in the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” in the New Testament.This mimetic concept of intertextuality is a far cry from postmodernist views. Postmodernist intertextuality has a generally deconstructive function. If a postmodernist author employs the genre conventions of literature, he does not want to fulfil his readers’ genre expectations and he does not want to stabilise his text by making it appear as part of an accepted literary genre. As Stefano Tani has shown, postmodernist literature rather tends to question the basic assumptions and to deconstruct the genre conventions of literature. This deconstructive intention can, in some cases, have certainly a critical and even a political function. As Linda Hutcheon points out in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), the intention of postmodernist writer is often to expose dominant discourses, literary conventions and genres as bourgeois, as logocentric, as male dominated etc. The rewriting of the canonical texts, for example, goes much beyond the postmodern literary practices of intertextuality and deconstruction. However, deconstruction for its own sake isfar more common in postmodernist literature asmany postmodernist writers play with different genre conventions at the same time, making them dismantle each other. Such a literature rejects all moral or political purposes and prides itself on its exclusively ludic function. It is not that the postmodern rewriting is by definition apolitical but simply that its potential political stance is much less self-evident and more problematic than that of postcolonial or feminist rewritings, as writing against representation and realism in general is a project different in kind as well as degree from writing against a specific political situation. Differentiating between the aesthetic agenda of the postmodernist rewritings and the political agendas of the postcolonial and feminist rewritings, Sylvia Soderlind in her article “Margins and Metaphors: The Politics of Post***” points out that the centre against which the postcolonial writer writes is the metropolis, whereas the centre against which the postmodern writer claims to write is much less easily defined other than as an aesthetic practice. What to the postcolonial writer is an inherently political project becomes for the postmodern writer much less clear. Soderlind asserts:The truly ‘marginal’.....is always part of a group with which he or she identifies. How then, has the collective “marginality” of the postcolonial allegory become the assumed marginality of the individual voice of authority in the postmodern text? I would argue that what has happened is that the collective voice of the colony has been silenced by the appropriating and individualising (coincidentally Western?) postmodern author. (Soderlind 45) Rewritings of the Canon can take different forms but a characterising feature that allows it to be distinguished from other forms of intertextuality is that it consists of a particularised and conscientious attachment to a single textual precedent, such that its departures from the original must be measured in terms of its dependence upon it. In such rewritings there is something deeper and more complex at work than the mere recycling or refurbishment of narratives. If rewriting interrogates the cultural authority of the original text, then this never amounts to a simple denial of it, but a dependence on, and fidelity to the original text is one of the essential requisites of a successful rewriting.Several instances of such rewritings have been explored in this chapter, such as Coetzee’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe in Foe, Marianne Wiggins’s rewriting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) in her John Dollar (1989), Peter Ackroyd’s reworking of Little Dorrit (1845) in The Great Fire of London(1982), Charlotte (2000) by D.M. Thomas which is a sequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Emma Tennant’s rewriting of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) in her Two Women of London: the Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989), and of Wuthering Heights (1832) in her Heathcliff’s Tale (2005).In each case the rewriting is of a well-known and canonical text. The cultural centrality of these textsis one of the reasons that the need to redefine their stances, on race, gender or aesthetics has presented itself to the critical reader and rewriter.J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe is, in addition to being a postcolonial treatise on the power relations between the coloniser and the colonised, a postmodern take on the authenticity of narration, the relationship between the text, the author and the reader. It is not only a reproduction of the plot and events of Robinson Crusoe; it is concerned more with the actual writing of Crusoe’s tale than with Crusoe’s island experience. In Foe, the actual story of Robinson Crusoe is taken as read and an additional year is added to the original Crusoe experience in which we are introduced to Susan Barton, a female castaway on Crusoe’s island. The story is centred around her experiences on the island—both Crusoe and Friday are seen through her perspective—as well as her attempts to get their story properly written by one Daniel Foe, the author figure who is a take on Daniel Defoe. Foe is both a rewriting of, and a metafiction about, Robinson Crusoe’s plot, theme, technique and the actual process of writing. It can also be called a prequel, not to the incidents in Robinson Crusoe, but to the actual writing down of the novel by Defoe which Coetzee tries to imaginatively reproduce in Foe. The main concern of the novel is not with events which have taken place on the island or beyond it, but with the struggles over the narration and the publication of those events. As Ina Grabe succinctly puts it, in paying more attention to the telling of the story than the story itself, the novel clearly participates in postmodernism's favouring of the signifier over the signified (147–48).Foe reintroduces Robinson Crusoe as Cruso; a variation that points to the distinction between Defoe’s Calvinistic, enlightened man and Coetzee’s postmodern narrative subject. Coetzee distinguishes his castaway from Defoe’s not only by calling him Cruso rather than Crusoe but also by deviating from the well-established story line and characterisation in Defoe’s classic. The character of Cruso in Foe is nothing like the hardworking, determined hero of Defoe. He is passively unconcerned with the passage of time or maintaining a record of the time spent on the island. On the contrary, it is Susan who urges Cruso to think of the future, to extend himself beyond his sterile dominion over his kingdom, she who urges him to keep some record of his stay on the island. He has also not been able to salvage anything of value from the ship, no tools or seeds or roots to help him in rebuilding a life for himself, no pens and paper with which to maintain a journal of his days on the island. Against Cruso’s ardent desire to have a table and a chair “for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world; I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table: so I went to work”. (Robinson Crusoe 102), Susan affirms that “in the hut Cruso had a narrow bed which was all his furniture” (Foe, 9). Later on in the novel she tells Friday:Does it not speak volumes that the first and only piece of furniture your master fashioned was a bed? How different would it not have been had he built a table and stool, and extended his ingenuity to the manufacture of ink and writing tablets, and then sat down to keep an authentic journal of his exile day by day, which we might have brought back to England with us, and sold to a bookseller, and so saved ourselves this embroilment with Mr Foe. (Foe 82) We must remember that all these things Defoe’s hero has done in his desire to maintain some semblance of civilisation on the island. Coetzee’s version seems to claim authenticity for his own version of the island experience as true and real and the reality of Robinson Crusoe as an idealised fabrication of the truth, a supposedly common technique of eighteenth century novelist. The first concern of Crusoe after saving his life and all that he can salvage from the ship, is to build himself a boat in which he ultimately succeeds, Coetzee’s Cruso dismisses the idea as useless:“May I ask sir” said I after a while, “why in all these years have you not built a boat and made your escape from the island?”“And where should I escape to?” he replied smiling to himself as though no answer were possible”“Why you might sail to the coast of Brazil or meet a ship and be saved”“Brazil is hundreds of miles distant, and full of cannibals,” said he. “As for sailing ships, we shall see sailing ships as well and better by staying at home.”….So I early began to see it was a waste of breath to urge Cruso to save himself. (Foe 13) Instead he is shown to be uselessly occupied in building terraces against the distant hope of some ship coming to the island with the requisite seeds and corn to be planted. Instead of being the optimistic pioneer of Defoe’s story who spends more than twenty eight years on the island and still has preserved his diehard spirit to the extent that he takes active part in the battle to rescue the Spanish ship which in turn rescues him from the island, and has the will to rebuild his own and Friday’s life anew after reaching England, Coetzee’s Cruso is a postmodern existentialist who is unable to make a meaningful life for himself on the island and who, on the other hand, dies on the voyage back to England as he finds himself unable to exist in a world beyond the island.Growing old on his island kingdom with no one to say him nay had so narrowed his horizon—when the horizon all around us was so vast and so majestic!—that he had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world. Besides, as I later found, the desire to escape had dwindled within him. His heart was set on remaining to his dying day king of his tiny realm. In truth it was not fear of pirates or cannibals that held him from making bonfires or dancing about on the hilltop waving his hat, but indifference to salvation. (Foe 13-14) Susan even questions the authenticity of the story told by Cruso about his island experience, and so forbears telling Cruso’s story from his perspective:I would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory and he no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy….. So in the end I did not know what was truth, what lies, and what was mere rambling. (Foe 11-12) So instead, Susan tells her own story and claims authenticity for her account of Cruso as the pathetic figure who has to be rescued against his wishes:Of the arrival of the strangers in his kingdom, Cruso had his first intimation when three seamen lifted him from his bed into a litter and proceeded to bear him down the path to the shore; and even then he likely thought it all a dream. But when he was hoisted aboard the abort and smelled the tar, and heard the creak of timbers, he came to himself and fought so hard to be freed that it took strong men to master him and convey him below. (Foe 39)Foe is narrated from the perspective of Susan Barton, a female castaway who is believed to be based on the protagonist of Roxana (Peter Childs 101), another novel written in the form of a fictitious narrative by Defoe. Throughout the novel she is called Roxana but more than halfway into the novel Defoe reveals that she has a lost daughter named Susan and that her daughter is named after her—“She was my own name” (Roxana 252). Coetzee takes the island conditions of Robinson Crusoe and overlays them with the narrative of Defoe's Roxana, whose picaresque feminine hero's real name is Susan and the echoes of whose life can be felt in the cursory life history of Susan Barton recorded in the novel before she comes to Cruso’s island and thus adding another layer of intertextuality to the rewritten text. In Coetzee’s Foe Susan Barton is also a woman who has lost her daughter to some slave traders. Returning from Bahia, where she has been searching for a lost daughter, Susan Barton is cast off the ship after a mutiny by the sailors, along with the dead body of the Captain who had been her lover on the ship and who is killed during the mutiny. She swims ashore and finds herself on the island inhabited by Cruso and Friday. She lives there for almost a year before being rescued by a passing merchantman. Cruso dies aboard ship while on way to England and Susan and Friday are left to make their way on their own.Once she arrives in England, Susan writes a memoir of her time on the island which she titles “The Female Castaway”, and seeks out the author, Foe, to have her story retold and get it published. Coetzee's novel comprises four parts; beginning with Susan's memoir, it continues in a series of letters addressed to Foe, letters that cannot be posted and do not reach him because he is in hiding to avoid his creditors and his whereabouts are not known, it proceeds to an account of Susan's relationship with Foe and her struggle to retain control over her story and its meaning and it ends with a sequence spoken by an unnamed narrator (possibly standing for Coetzee himself) who revises the history as we know it and dissolves the narration in an act of authorial renunciation. Throughout the novel, Friday's silent and enigmatic presence gains in significance until it overwhelms the entire narrative at the end. Once she reaches England, Susan becomes marginal to her own story. “When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all story tellers?” (Foe 51).The second part of the novel is written in the form of Susan’s letters addressed to Foe, the novelist to whom she entrusts her own, and her version of Cruso’s, story, though later she has misgivings about her role in the narration, “Who but Cruso, who is no more could truly tell you Cruso’s story? I should have said less about him, more about myself…for though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth” (Foe 51). Susan increasingly becomes desirous of exercising the same authoritative self-possession as that of Foe, the proposed author ofCruso’s story. “I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget it”, she says to Foe, reversing their genders. “It is not I who am the intended but you” (Foe 126). But the acknowledgment of the joint parentage of her narrative brings her to realise the dilemma of being the author or the source, or being the author as well as the source. Dedicating her life to the telling of her story but being compelled to deliver that story through another, Susan is beset with doubts as to the manipulation of the truth through the forces outside the narrative:“In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt itself. Who is speaking me?” (Foe 131) The tranferential effect of narrating, of speaking for oneself as another, or speaking for another as oneself, means that the responsibility of narration can never be one’s own alone; narration can never be self-authorship or pure paternal begetting. It is for this reason that Susan Barton’s narrative, or the narration of how her narrative came to be silenced in the writing of Foe—the author who represents Defoe, and as such his writing with all its shortcomings and enforced silences, must stand for the original Robinson Crusoe—joins with another, even more profound loss of voice—that of the tongue less Friday. In another significant departure from the Defoe’s text, Friday is depicted as having had his tongue ripped out by the slavers who try to capture him and as such has nothing to say for himself. Foe is confident that he and Susan can decipher the non-speech of Friday, can penetrate to his heart. In this, of course, Coetzee is meditating on the unending possibilities, and the responsibility of those who undertake to speak on behalf of others, those who have had no voice, or those who have been silenced, in the classical narratives of the established canon. To rewrite the narratives of the past is to undo and rectify the remissions of that “eternal and inhuman wakefulness” of self-present consciousness, to allow those blinks of the eye, “the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices speak in our lives” (Foe 30). But such rewriting must also take care that it speak in the voice of the other only in that self’s terms whose silences can be as varied as the articulations and speeches of other selfs. Susan warns Foe that:You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being reshaped day by day in conformity with the desire of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. (Foe 121)Coetzee presents this commitment to the other in the final chapters of Foe. In these chapters, a first person narrator, an “I” who may be Foe or Defoe, or Susan or Coetzee himself, or some compound of them all, begins to rewrite the rewritten narrative which Susan Barton has already provided. The dreamlike quest of this “I” is for the speech of Friday, a speech below, or before the speech that always drowns his speech. It takes the “I” deep in dream or vision, first to Foe’s room, where he lies with Susan, Friday asleep at their feet, and then into the waters off Cruso’s island, where Susan Barton and her Captain lie drowned, along with Friday. Somehow an unidentifiable voicecomes out of Friday’s mouth, which passes into some form of speech through his interlocutor :This is not the place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday……His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. (Foe 154)To make the voice of Friday articulate would be to betray it sentimentally into self-present intelligibility, for the comfort of the guilty self; but not to articulate its silences would be an even worse betrayal. The voice that it ends up speaking belongs to no one, consists in or occupies the space of its giving, the sacrifice of itself. It is not possible to judge Foe’s combination of the gift of voice to the other with the refusal to credit that other with as anything but a negativity, as a certain curbing of the gift, as a donation which reverts to the credit of the self seemingly dispossessed. Coetzee’s novel itself provides the image of just such a recursive structure, in Susan’s document of manumission hung like a yoke around Friday’s neck, the gift of freedom given in a language the exclusion from which marks the very impossibility of freedom for Friday, making him “the helpless captive of my desire to have our story told” (Foe 150), such acknowledgements of the difficulty of giving freedom unconditionally on Susan’s and Coetzee’s part guarantee no immunity for the novel itself against the dangers of reversion to the mentality of the slave-owner and the colonist.Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar is also a postmodern rewriting of Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Like Coetzee’s Foe, it also claims for the female an experience of extremity which in both Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies is represented as male. John Dollar is a rewriting of Golding’s Lord of the Flies by Marianne Wiggins who calls it a “Female Lord of the Flies”. The novel opens in Cornwall, with the image of an old Indian woman servant burying the body of her mistress Charlotte. For the last six decades the two women have had a sort of life on the Cornish coast that is little better than death: “Year after year they refused to forget, to look forward, look inward, look anywhere, but to sea. . . . Nothing progressed. Nothing changed”(5). Now Charlotte has died in actual fact and as she digs, the Indian—her name is Menaka, called Monkey by the British—remembers another digging, how “she and Charlotte had killed them . . . had dragged their two bodies down to the sea for the vultures and sharks,” and then dug a grave for another body, puzzling its bones “out in the earth till they looked like a man” (8).From there the scene shifts to the 1917 colonial Burma where Charlotte Lewes, a young Briton newly widowed by the Great War, arrives to escape the ruins of her life. As a schoolteacher in Rangoon she first excites interest among the colonial society as a single British woman come to Burma in search of a husband for:No self-respecting single woman ever travelled to the Raj alone for any other purpose, in their view. A sojourn with a relative or in a missionary service only served as thin disguise of the laudable, and necessary, trade in British brides for British bachelors in the Civil Service and the Army, plus it guaranteed the Empire’s racial purity. A single English woman on the social scene was a thing imported like the bonded gin, a bit of home to aid morale, old thing. (John Dollar 24)Very soon Charlotte learns that the British colony in Burma is trapped in the previous century and all the changes that had overtaken Europe in the 20th century had passed them by, as if “the English there weren’t conscious of the current century” (25). The picture of the British colony is representative of such colonies all over the Empire at the beginning of the 20th century:The Irrawaddy River happened – and yet nothing of its floods, its traces, caused the slightest perturbation in the course of British life. Red-brick monumental office buildings were constructed. Clubs were organized. Petunia seeds were planted where the former frangipani grew….They read the London papers, two weeks late. They ate off English bones and starched their Irish linen. They imported Life As They Thought It Was, with confidence (sic). (John Dollar 26-27) She learns to ignore the customs and traditions of the English colonial society, starts dressing as Burmese men and women and becomes invisible to both the British and the Burmese. During this period, she meets John Dollar, a sailor who rescues her and later becomes her lover, when she loses her way while swimming with the dolphins and is about to be drowned. On a festive seafaring expedition, the tightly knit British community sets out from their colony in Burma, to claim an uninhabited island as a birthday gift for King George V in 1918.To celebrate the royal birthday, the colony organizes an expedition to an island in the Andaman Sea, off Burma. They plan to camp on the island, named by Marco Polo “The Island of Our Outlawed Dreams,” and rename it for King George. It is going to be an English sort of trip: lots of provisions and paraphernalia, campfires and tea, a 21-shot revolver salute, “God Save the King” sung by the women and various other activities are organised. The English here presume superiority over all, such as their colonized subjects: “We own everything. They don’t own even their own backsides. We own them ... because we’re better. There isn’t anything we can’t own in any corner of the world wherever we might want it” (64).The first part of the novel is taken up with an expedition to the island first named by Marco Polo, which the party intends to rename “King George’s Island” in honour of the king’s birthday. The collusion of kingship, birth and naming is appropriate; the landing on the island is equivalent for the men and boys to the colonising experience all over again, to the charting of the unknown: Everyone who stepped ashore that day (except the bearers) had either read or heard the story of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe so there was that, that sense of exhilaration which comes when one’s life bears a likeness to the fictions one’s dreamed; plus there was the weighty thrill of bringing light, the torch of history, into one more far flung reach of darkness. (John Dollar 69)John Dollar is a rewriting not only of Lord of the Flies but the whole Crusoe tradition, symbolising the colonising process of charting the unknown, naming the unnamed and civilising the savage. There are various other informed references to Robinson Crusoe, such as naming the native servants after the days of the week, speculations regarding the rescue of a sailor caught in similar predicament as Crusoe and the transcription of Crusoe’s notebook balancing the “Evil” and the “Good” in his circumstances (70).The party that lands on the island that day is full of a self-righteous sense of doing right and congratulating itself on the progress they have made in civilisation.The superficiality of this civilised fa?ade is proved on the very first night as thousands of sea turtles swim ashore to lay eggs. The sight of so many turtles coming to the island in waves upon waves presents a strange moonlit spectacle that first frightens and then drives the campers in a kind of frenzy. Men and boys begin savagely smashing the eggs and killing the turtles. Next morning the air is strangely still with a hint of the earthquake and tsunami to come but none of them realise it and some of the men leave on a hunting expedition. Charlotte and John, who have come on one boat with eight of her girl pupils, are woken up in the middle of the night by Jib who notices something strange about the other boat and he and John row over to the second boat. They don’t find any one on board but it appears as if some carnage has taken place there. There is blood all around but no dead bodies and at that moment, while they are still puzzling over the disappearance of the bodies, an earthquake hits the island and a tidal wave engulfs the ship. They confront disaster in the shape of an earthquake and ensuing tsunami. The school girls in the party are shipwrecked on the island after the tsunami washes away all the adults accompanying them except their schoolteacher Charlotte and John Dollar. Swept overboard, Charlotte, John Dollar, and eight young girls who are Charlotte’s pupils, awake on a remote island beach but Charlotte disappears in the forest on the other side of the island after losing her eyesight. Eight girls lie on the beach amid the wreckage of their boat. They seem to be the only survivors until two days later, exploring, they find John, near dead and paralysed from the waist down. The girls are left to fend for themselves as Charlotte goes blind and disappears into the forest and John Dollar is paralysed and dying after breaking his spine in the incident.Nollie and Amanda, the oldest girls, form a kind of primitive society for which they formulate the rules as leaders. Once John regains consciousness, he tries to guide them to a safer place higher up on the other side of the island but his authority over the increasingly wild girls is undermined due to his physical helplessness. They do not want to leave the place where they have landed and which has become a kind of home to them. Ultimately he has to tell them a fantastic story about a monster that may come to eat him in order to make them obey his advice. He is carried to the top of the island by the girls and ironically his story about the man-eating monster comes true. One day two boats appear on the island carrying a group of cannibals who are holding the girls’ father as prisoners. As they watch from the height, their fathers are roasted alive and eaten up by the tribals. The shock of the gruesome incident disintegrates the precarious society and the children are divided into savages and victims. Eventually, with more killings and cannibalism, John and five of the children perish. Monkey finds Charlotte, who has survived on another part of the island and together they execute the girls who have become cannibals. They dig graves on the island to bury the remains of John Dollar who has been partially eaten by Amanda and Nolly, and the girls themselves. We presume that ultimately Charlotte and Monkey have been rescued as the story opens sixty years later in Cornwall, and we come back through darkness to the initial dark scene, in which, down from a bleak hillside farm in Cornwall, an aged woman of Indian nationality leads a donkey bearing the body of a still older Englishwoman. In the village, the Indian, who calls herself Monkey, seeks burial for her companion but is turned away by a priest. That night, sneaking into the cemetery, she buries the body herself.Like the boys in Lord of the Flies, the girls also begin with instituting laws which soon collapse. The parallels with the Golding novel are insistently present from the beginning; where the boys experience a visit from the adult world, in the quasi-divine personage of the dead parachutist, whom they ritually worship as some deity, the girls tend and ritually consume their own adopted god John Dollar. It is interesting to note that both novels use the experience of the children to depict the swift disintegration of the rigid and disciplined social order and rationality associated with the patriarchal British Empire. The children are young and natural and on them the restraining effects of civilisation are not so strong as to make them withstand the animal instincts that call for a reversion to the laws of the jungle in a moment of crisis. It is the force of habit that makes them institute and implement the laws of civilised society in the beginning but it gives way under the pressure of lawlessness and the battle of survival. It is significant that in both cases the children are without any adult supervision and so the reversion to the basic animal instincts is just a matter of time. The experience of reversion in Lord of the Flies takes place within a structure of polar binaries: Reason, order, science and law, embodied in the persons of Ralph and Piggy, on one hand and savagery, chaos and mindless ecstasy on the other. The fact that the boys share a common class and national background makes this symbolic dichotomy all the more clear and emphatic. The novel’s theme is the predominance of evil as the basic human instinct and the presence of the dark or primitive order within the self which all civilisations and religions are trying to suppress and mould into a semblance of social and ethical order. This is evident from Ralph’s grief towards the end of the novel at the deterioration and disintegration of the social ethos. He can still measure the distance between the values of civilisation and what the boys have descended to on the island “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy”(299). The schoolgirls stranded on the island in John Dollar come from much more diverse backgrounds than the boys in the Lord of the Flies. Each of them is given a kind of biography before they come together on this island. More importantly they are not presented and they do not conceive of themselves as the emblematic bearers of Western values and cultural identity except Nolly who thinks that:They’ve been set apart, set down as chosen ones with an as-yet unrevealed purpose, a mission at hand. It had occurred to her, waking this morning, that perhaps there were Natives here, Beings to whom they’d been sent, she’d been sent, to instruct in his Word. (John Dollar 123)It is significant that Nolly belongs to the family of a clergyman. Her father is Reverend Petherbridge of Church of England. But the party consists of not only colonial girls but a number of marginal characters and social misfits, including Menaka (Monkey), the Indian servant girl, Gaby, the Portuguese daughter of a highly unconventional kite-maker, Jane, whose brother has been killed in the Great War, reducing her life to a kind of lower or smaller existence:He held a sort of radiance. He was their hope. What she was was Jane, something that came after “Hope” – an afterthought, a lapse.……. When she looks into the mirror, which she seldom does, she’s surprised to find she owns a body. Its I who go here sir, she often needs to say, just jane. (John Dollar 50-51)Charlotte, who travels to Rangoon in an attempt to escape the miserable life of a war widow in England, is fascinated by the absence of rigid social customs and laws offered by the colonial societies to the colonisers: “She envied them their cosmology, their canonically fixed purpose. She, too, longed to live in a non-world, outside existence of the law and literature, of the King’s Own Version of the text” (John Dollar 30). It is men, and specially boys who seem to inhabit a stable world of meanings and laws, partly because of the fact that their lives are organised around the violent enforcement of such meanings and laws. Even before the Apocalyptic events leading to all of them being stranded on the island where they suffer from an eventual loss of language as an acquired trait, Charlotte finds the English language inadequate as signifier to express her Burmese experiences:She wanted words to match the things she saw. English failed the hundred different shades of reds she saw in flowers and spices. She didn’t know the names of trees she saw, of birds, and fruits. She couldn’t find the names for things within the lexicon she was familiar with….and what she wanted, what she sought was language to describe it all. (John Dollar 22)Similarly, after the dissolving force of the tidal wave, the girls must try to survive in a world where names do not cohere with what they name, where time has become indefinite and immeasurable, and identity is frighteningly fluid. Like the schoolboys in The Lord of the Flies, the girls slide slowly into chaos and brutality. In their struggle to stay alive, they depend on John to guide them as an adult and when he cannot do so—in the beginning he has lost even his speech and girls torture him to elicit any response from him—they lapse into a kind of primitive barbarism culminating in shocking and riveting scenes of savagery and redemption by death. In the final chapters of the novel, the girls, who have witnessed a tribe of cannibals who visit their island burning and eating their fathers, begin ritually to eat the flesh of John Dollar from his still alive body. The lethargic life of superstition, magic and ritual into which the girls relapse is in fact a new, displaced version of the systemised rationality they have left behind rather than its opposite. After the Andaman Islanders leave, the girls in their increasingly violent madness begin to acquire the vestiges of civilisation—fire, a social order and a religion to replace the Christianity they’ve lost. Civilisation itself begins here in barbarism and madness, and the question of good and evil, into which Robinson Crusoe so neatly divided his experience, starts to seem like a construct to hide our amorality from ourselves. Deprived of fathers and their laws, the girls are in a sense forced to become the authors of their own destiny but without any clearly formed sense of identity their acts of self-authorship are dependent upon the absent law of the father. Nolly rewrites the Christianity she has been born into and lived by as Demonism, and she and Amanda together replace their murdered fathers by John Dollar on whom they all depend out of their hopelessness and when he fails to be the god they demand, they punish him in a gruesome manner by making him a sacrifice and consuming him ritualistically as sacrificial meat:They desired him to evidence omniscience, a higher wisdom than their own–they believed in his capacity to right their wrongs, to lead them, to resist their natural predilection for defiance. A state of subjugation makes its own revolts when the object of its worship fails to stimulate belief in its omnipotence. (John Dollar 205)We learn from the flash forward that actually opens the novel that Charlotte, her sight suddenly restored, and the little Indian servant girl called Monkey, have killed the last remaining girls and buried the body of the now-dead John Dollar before being rescued. Having carried Charlotte’s body down from the Cornish moors where they have been living for long years after their rescue, Monkey is forbidden by a priest to give Charlotte Christian burial without authorisation. Undaunted by this she creeps into the graveyard at night and starts digging a grave to bury Charlotte and this takes her back to another digging and another burial almost sixty years ago. “The English makes laws,” Menaka (Monkey) reflects: “He makes one law for men. He makes one law for women, a law for his children... The English would never fill rivers with corpses, he hides them instead in the ground... He buries his dead so the other white castes will not cook them and eat them” (John Dollar 7). Monkey knows the brutality of these egocentric, ethnocentric, and imperialistic “laws”. She also knows their fragility, having witnessed the English literally eating themselves when stranded on the uninhabited island they had set out from their colony in Burma to claim as a birthday gift for King George V.This absolute collusion of the sacred and the profane, of law and transgression, both resembles and differs from the dominion of evil as opposed to good in Golding’s novel. In Lord of the Flies the theme is the preponderance of evil as original sin, as inherent in a man’s nature which has to be controlled and suppressed by laws outside it and which comes to the fore by any intentional or accidental relaxation of those laws. Still Golding differentiates between depravity, disorder or chaos and evil from rationality, order and good. In John Dollar we find a much more radical intertwining of civilisation and lawlessness, of humanity and bestiality, of worshipping and sacrificial eating. In a sense the girls’ reconstruction of a society based upon killing and sacrificial eating is reminiscent of what happens in Lord of the Flies. There too, the savage killing and eating of the pig is both a transgression as well as a celebration of the rules of civilisation. This sacrifice marks out the region of the sacred, the pig’s head that becomes a symbolic Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, and the profane, the pig that is identified with the scapegoat and the outsider and the sacrificial eating is a form of banishing the profane and absorbing the sacred. Unlike Lord of the Flies, which does indeed still repose hope in a form of knowledge, recognition and memory of good, John Dollar seems to suggest that civilisation can only survive side by side the repeated acts of violence and sacrifice. Since it deliberately eschews the allegorical and didactic mode which so effectively governs Lord of the Flies, it is difficult to understand the underlying philosophy of John Dollar except a sort of helplessness and lack of distinction between good and evil, humanity and bestiality, sacred and profane. D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte, is also a juxtaposition of the Victorian laws of reticence and modesty opposite the supposedly hidden depravity and profanity of the era. This novel undertakes to rewrite Charlotte Bronte’s most famous work Jane Eyre starting off where the Victorian work ends and occasionally informing the reader of what is supposed to have actually taken place in the novel of which the original novel is a glossed over and glorified version. The postmodern rewriting imitates Bronte’s style of writing, sometimes even using fragments from the original novel and hopes to startle the reader by interpolating overtly sexual confessions. Thus we are privileged to know that Rochester was impotent, that he was in the habit of cross-dressing for Grace Poole who is now revealed to be his erstwhile mistress, that Bertha Mason had many lovers and a son. Referring to the novel as “the modernised image of Victorianism”, Susan Onega and Christian Gutleben, in the introduction to their Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film comment on its “perverse and paradoxical effect”:By subverting the novel’s prudishness it enhances it. We feel indeed grateful to the Victorian work for not insisting on Rochester’s ‘soft and small male member”, or on Jane’s masturbatory habits, and we discover new virtues to the Victorian art of the unsaid, the understated and the hypothetical. (Onega and Gutleben11) The first five chapters of the novels are a rewriting of the last part of Jane Eyre beginning with the marriage of Jane with Mr Rochester. It starts with Jane’s account of her life after marriage just like the last chapter of Jane Eyre with the occasional deviations and interpolations. In the very first chapter there is a reference to Grace Poole, hinting on a more significant part played by her in Rochester’s life after the tragedy at Thornfield Hall and Jane’s still modest description of her wedding night which is missing in the original: “It is well known that in novels—for example, the novels of Miss Austen—the pen falters just at the point where, perhaps, the most interesting narrative begins, after the wedding ceremony. With the consequence that not only are the rituals of the marriage chamber avoided but the ordinary, humdrum details of the start of a married life”. (Charlotte 20-21)After having said that, the novel goes on to rectify these two lapses on the part of Miss Austen, or Miss Bronte for that matter. We are also shown a letter from St. John Rivers that hints at the repressed sensuous nature of Jane as well as the ardent and passionate love that he bore for her in another significant deviation from the original characterisation:I wish that I had opened up my heart to you. That cold heart that you despised so much! My heart was far from cold….From the moment I saw you, I recognised in you a quality that made me your slave for ever: a passionate quality, all the more powerful because I am sure you yourself were unconscious of it. Every movement of your body, your eyes, your lips, bespoke an ardent passionate nature. (Charlotte 40-41) In the beginning it appears to be simply an alternative look at what happened after the “happily ever after” in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in a more realistic, somewhat cynical vein. We learn that Jane and Rochester didn’t live happily ever after. Trouble starts when the Miss Temple of Jane Eyre reappears in Jane’s life as Mrs Ashford, now married and on a much more equal footing with Jane who was her erstwhile pupil. During her tète a tète with her Jane learns that she knows nothing about the process of procreation and is in fact still a virgin. We also come to know that Grace Poole had been a mistress of Rochester before she was brought to be the caretaker and gaoler of Bertha Mason and is still in a relationship with him, that Adele was actually Rochester’s daughter and that Rochester and Bertha had a son who is the legal heir to Rochester. Jane confronts Rochester with these findings and in a fit of frustration he goes out on his wildest horse, stays out throughout the night and is brought back dead in the morning having broken his neck in a wild fall from the horse. Jane decides to go to Martinique with Grace Poole as a companion, to look for Rochester and Bertha’s heir and bring him back to England.In the sixth chapter the scene suddenly shifts to Martinique in 1999 where Miranda Stevenson, an English literature professor with a love for the Victorian era has come to attend a literary conference and present a paper on Charlotte Bronte. There is a symbolic mixing of Miranda’s identity with that of Charlotte Bronte as the volunteer sent to receive Miranda confuses her name with the topic she is going to speak on. There is also a deliberate comparative analysis of Charlotte Bronte’s supposedly repressed personalitywith her own:A woman brought up in the narrow world of a vicarage, in a remote corner of northern England, in a taboo-ridden society, with a fairly remote father, and only two sisters and a brother for companionship, would inevitably be forced into a life of deceit, of feelings and thoughts withheld—even from her own self. (Charlotte 137)In reply to a question, following the talk she is giving on Bronte, whether Charlotte Bronte’s life would have been similar to her own had she been alive today she claims:“Yes I think she might have followed a similar track. She’d have studied English, probably gone to London, taken a PhD—which might have interfered with her creativity. She’d have married….she might by now be on her second marriage, or be divorced and bringing up a couple of children on her own! Who can tell?” (Charlotte 138-139)Through Miranda’s reminiscences we come to realise that the supposed alternative manuscript that we have read at the beginning of the novel was actually faked by Miranda to please her father who was a great scholar and lover of the Victorian Era and it was meant as a birthday present to him. We also learn that Miranda has a husband and two children back home in England and that she has a problematic relationship with her father. Her alternative ending to Jane Eyre is significant for as it develops, Jane’s increasingly troubled marriage to Mr Rochester mirrors Miranda’s own failing relationship with her husband, David, and Jane’s eventual discovery of Mr Rochester’s self-destructive sexual deviance leads to the revelation of Miranda’s nearly incestuous relationship with her father. Also, Miranda is obsessed with the character of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s first wife, who, in Bronte’s novel, was insane. In her study of Bertha, Miranda seeks to understand her own mother’s manic depression and come to terms with the ways in which her mother’s mental illness warped her, Miranda’s, relationship with her father. Chapter 11 is again a continuation of the supposedly resurfaced alternate manuscript and recounts Jane Eyre’s trip to Martinique. She is accompanied by Grace Poole and her husband, (Grace Poole has married on the voyage out) in her quest for the missing heir and the missing past of Mr Rochester. There are other shocks and surprises in store for her. It is discovered that the child is a throwback on some coloured ancestor of Bertha and is literally black and this is what led to the eventual collapse of Rochester’s marriage with Bertha as he suspected her of adultery. Although he was so much in love with her till the end of his life that he became incapable of a relationship with anyone else, even Jane Eyre. While travelling in search of Robert Rochester Jane rescues a Negro slave beaten and bound from a tree and he is discovered to be the missing son of Mr Rochester who, because of his colour, is mistaken for a Negro and sold into slavery. While in Martinique, Miranda has several sexual encounters with virtual strangers and records them too. Towards the end of the novel we come to know that it was for the benefit and enjoyment of her father, to make him a part of the experience so that the child she ultimately conceives can be called their child. Once she leaves the island, perspective shifts to that of her father writing his journal that gives an insight into the relationship shared by him with his daughter. And finally, there is again a shift to the old manuscript in the form of a letter from Robert Rochester to the former Miss Temple summing it all up, with Jane and Robert Rochester living together in sin as they can’t marry because of their relationship with each other. She catches a fever and dies before giving birth to their child she is carrying and he also sends her a packet containing the writings of Jane Eyre which in itself might be a rewriting of the original Jane Eyre as he says:Had she lived longer, she would have presented my mother in a different, slightly softer light. But as she once said to me, we are all bound within the island of our time, and our upbringing, and only a great passion, a great faith, can free us from it. (Charlotte 200-201)Here also, the rewritten text provides facts, certainties and definitive closure whereas the original text remains implicit, uncertain and open, so much so that there are so many alternative endings of it possible and hence the Victorian novel appears to be the more ambiguous, contingent and unresolved—in other words more postmodernist—text. Through the character of Miranda who is significantly mistaken for Charlotte Bronte, D. M. Thomas explores the relationship between an author and her work with reference to the times it was written in, the context that shapes the expression of an author’s sensibility and its effect on the succeeding generations of writers and their interpretations of their predecessors’ texts.Peter Ackroyd’s rewriting of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, as The Great Fire of London (1982) is a typical example of the problematic relationship between a contemporary novelist and his predecessors as well as a remarkable piece of metanarration. Incidentally also a debut novel, it establishes its author’s concept of his fictional London, which focuses primarily on the city’s unofficial, off-the-record history. The Great Fire of London can be understood as a kind of a “proto-text” containing all the major defining aspects of its author’s fictional city, which are explored in more in-depth ways in his later, more mature London novels. It has a very specific position in its author’s oeuvre both in terms of its narrative structure and thematic composition as it anticipates the narrative strategies and thematic concerns of his later novels. In an interview with Susana Onega in 1996, Ackroyd polemically denied that he had ever felt the “anxiety of influence” but he admitted that the “double process of absorption and recasting of the achievements of the preceding masters” amounted to a process of self-exploration of himself (Onega 212). Of course, he was also referring to his fictional biographies of great writers of the past, such as Chatterton and Dickens, where he really seems to identify with the author he is writing about. In actual fact, to his mind biography and fiction are “simply aspects of the same process” (213). On a less serious note Ackroyd also acknowledges a “magpie-like” quality in his writing, adding: “my interest in lifting or adopting various styles, various traces, various languages, is part of my imaginative trend” (213).The Great Fire of London is not so much a rewriting of Little Dorrit as a novel infused with the flavour of Dickens’s world and his works. The title of the novel has been taken from a random phrase in Little Dorrit “after the Great Fire of London” (italics mine) spoken by a minor character simply known as Mr F’s aunt. It is one of the oblique references to Dickens’s novel and open only to the initiated.The Great Fire of London has got an intentionally misleading title, as it does not concern the famous apocalyptic event of 1666 but revolves around a contemporary film director’s unsuccessful attempt at making a film version of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855-57), culminating in a final scene during which the film sets and the surrounding part of the city burn down in a great fire started by one of the novel’s characters. However, even though the story touches on current themes such as film-making, homosexuality and homelessness, its central concern is Dickens and his London, together with the various connections between the Victorian and the present-day city. The choice of the prominent Victorian novelist as the catalyst of Ackroyd’s first novel is not surprising as he has always shown considerable admiration for Dickens, whom he considers one of the most outstanding London writers, and about whom he has written several fictional and non-fictional books, namely the impressive biography Dickens (1990). Ackroyd believes Dickens to be one of the city’s most sensitive observers as he, “of all novelists, knew the city” (Ackroyd, London: The Biography 320), a view that forms the basis of Ackroyd’s conception of the metropolis. “The theatricality of Dickens’s city, its energy, and its colourful inhabitants affected Ackroyd profoundly” and his “own novels, too, seek to convey this sense of excitement and busyness, of noise and happenstance” (Lewis 162).Structurally, The Great Fire of London “follows the characteristic multi-plot pattern of Victorian fiction” (Onega, Peter Ackroyd 27) as in the opening chapters it introduces a miscellaneous cast of characters in the best Dickensian tradition, including various eccentric or otherwise peculiar figures, whose fates are later brought together through their involvement in making the film or simply by their inhabiting the same area in which Little Dorrit is set and its latest film version shot. The novel starts with an overt reference to Dickens’s novel and the motto is a kind of summary of the first part of Little Dorrit ending with the protagonists’ release from Marshalsea. The lead figure, moreover, is a film director who is trying to make a film from the novel. The other main character is a mentally disturbed young woman—named Audrey Skelton—obsessed with the idea that she is a reincarnation of Dickens’s heroine. Ackroyd’s debt to the Victorian novelist, however, is not limited to these explicit references. The writer actually adopts a similar narrative method to the one employed by Dickens. Each of the introductory chapters is devoted to one of the main characters and the reader is given no clue as to their relationships. As in Little Dorrit the first chapter introduces what seems the least important character in the story i.e. Little Arthur. Yet his name, which refers to both protagonists in Dickens’s novel—Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam—suggests that, far from being a minor figure, he might turn out to be a very important one in the story. He is actually the agent of an ending which both mirrors and deconstructs the ending of the first part of Dickens’s novel. In spite of the desultory presentation of characters and situations, recalling Dickens’s “fragmented vision”, The Great Fire of London has a unity of its own, achieved partly through a closely-knit structure—all the threads of the story converge at a single point—and partly through a metaphorical use of setting. As in Little Dorrit, London and the prison represent something more than a mere background; they are in actual fact a symbolic halo enveloping the entire action. Another unifying device is of course the third-person narration, punctuated by authorial comments, either serious or ironic, which creates a dominant point of view. The interconnectedness between Dickens’s and present-day London is further reinforced by the trans historical parallelism also suggested by the names of the characters that evoke those of Dickens’s—Little Arthur evokes Arthur Clennam, the half-wit with a drooping mouth Pally is the contemporary equivalent of Little Dorrit’s friend Maggie, and Audrey Skelton through whom the eponymous character appears to be speaking and who believes herself to be Amy Dorrit. Rowan Phillips, a Canadian, Cambridge-based homosexual academic and novelist specialising in Dickens may be taken as a parodic version of Ackroyd himself (Onega, Peter Ackroyd 28). Moreover, in a similar fashion, “many of the secondary characters have names that point to their condition as types” and “are masterfully characterized in a few brush strokes that underline some outstanding physical trait or peculiarity” (Onega 20). The most grotesque member of this cast is Arthur Feather, or Little Arthur as he is nicknamed due to his dwarfish stature, an eccentric, caricature-like half-wit conceived in the best Dickensian tradition. Little Arthur suffers not only from social isolation resulting from his physical handicap, but also from a serious form of psychosis which does not manifest itself only thanks to the fact that Arthur devotes his whole existence to his job as an operator of the Fun City amusement arcade. When the arcade is closed Arthur’s despair knows no limits, his wounded psyche soon loses touch with reality and his mental disorder comes to the surface, with fatal consequences—he accidentally kills a little girl from the neighbourhood in what he believes to be an act of saving her innocence from the snares of the hateful outside world. Yet, not even prison confinement restores peace to Arthur’s semi-insane mind, as when the film crew arrive in the prison in order to shoot some scenes for Spender’s film, he identifies in the actress playing Little Dorrit the same girl whom he tried to “save” earlier and decides to repeat the altruistic act, this time by short-circuiting the electricity system of the prison, by which he merely sets the other inmates free. Audrey Skelton feels bored and unfulfilled in her job as a telephone operator and so she spends much of her time daydreaming about being some other person, rich and famous, imagining in detail what such a life would be like, a desire no one else around her seems to understand. She often lapses “into a kind of trance”, as if “possessed”, and thus represents a mystery even “to those who knew, and loved, her best” (The Great Fire of London 8). And so, after she visits the site where the prison which features in Dickens’s novel used to stand, she at first starts dreaming about living in the novel’s story and later, when she attends a spiritualist séance, she comes to believe herself to be some sort of reincarnation of Amy Dorrit, a medium through which the poor little girl attempts to pass on some secret. This, however, throws Audrey into an even greater isolation as she becomes paranoid, fearing that “the clever ones” from the outside world want “to get hold of the secret” (The Great Fire of London 113), which she therefore must protect.Tim Coleman, Audrey’s boyfriend, feels no worries concerning his life, thanks to his carefree and optimistic nature and more importantly because he has an adorable and loving girlfriend. All this, however, proves to be very fragile and collapses like a house of cards when Audrey becomes possessed with the spirit of Amy Dorrit and loses all interest in her previous life, her boyfriend included. Having been repeatedly rejected or ignored by his girlfriend, Tim finds distraction and solace in the company of Rowan Phillips, at first in the form of searching for the lost London of Dickens’s novels and later in drinking, followed by tentative homosexual practices. However, when Rowan discovers that for Tim he is a mere intimate surrogate for the lost Audrey he refuses to see him again, which throws Tim into a more intensified state of helplessness and confusion, in which he so much identifies himself as a victim of external circumstances that he even comes to sympathise with Audrey and her peculiar behaviour. Filled with “feelings of rejection and uncertainty” (The Great Fire of London 142), unable to face the treatment he receives from others,Tim desperately looks for any kind of emotional support that would help him through the crisis of his emotional and sexual frustration. Audrey and Tim thus represent two different kinds of lonely characters who, in effect, face a similar situation—they have lost their former sense of self and are unable to recover it by themselves.Rowan Phillips is no more successful in coping with the pressures of life than Tim and Audrey. Dissatisfied with the provincialism and academic sterility of life in Cambridge, he goes to London with the belief that it can provide him with what will fulfil him most—sexual freedom and limitless opportunities to find an accessible object for his erotic fantasies. This he disguises under the “official” reason of moving to the city in order to be “close to his ‘material’” (The Great Fire of London 19), that is Charles Dickens, about whom he is supposed to write a critical study. However, his frenetic searching for a sexual partner brings him no satisfaction, joy or ease, and he eventually really does turn to his work on Dickens, both for his study and the script of Spender’s film, so as to “rescue himself from the day” (The Great Fire of London 21), from the growing sense of emptiness and futility of his own miserable existence. Moreover, his despair deepens when he becomes strongly attracted to Tim, who cannot and does not return his affection in the manner he would like him to do. The frustrated Rowan bitterly realises that neither his night expeditions to gay bars nor his scholarly research can help him escape from himself, from his unhappiness resulting from the fact that what he actually longs for is not one-night, anonymous sex, but to care for someone who loves him back, which only intensifies his feelings of loneliness and rejection.At first sight, Spenser Spender seems to be a different case as he has a job he likes, a wife he loves, and, moreover, he is offered a chance to fulfil his professional dream of making his beloved Dickens’s novel, Little Dorrit, into an artistically valuable feature film. He thus engages himself fully in realising his vision of making a film that would capture the very spirit of Dickensian London. However, he gradually becomes so absorbed in this project that he even starts to disregard his own wife Laetitia, or Letty, who at first tries in vain to bring Spenser back to reality, and then seeks what she has been denied at home—attentiveness, tenderness and courtesy—from the polished and elegant, yet ultimately self-important, pompous and egotistical, Andrew Christopher, with whom she eventually moves in after she leaves her seemingly unconcerned husband. Spenser’s personal loss is accompanied with professional ones. The Film Finance Board is cutting funds for his film and he is forced to reduce the script and drastically limit his creative aspirations. On top of this, the film crew go on strike for better working conditions after one of the technicians gets hurt in a minor incident by a fallen arc-light. There is a gleam of hope for him when Letty, after a failed suicide attempt, returns to him and the two realise how much they love and need each other, yet Ackroyd lets him die in a futile attempt to save the film’s London sets from burning in a fire set by the psychically disordered Audrey and a group of homeless vagrants whom she persuades to be her accomplices in this mindless arson.Most importantly, what all these characters also have in common is the fact that their unhappiness and disturbed states of mind are always directly, literally as well as metaphorically, connected with London. For Audrey and her fragile psyche the city is hostile from the very beginning, as, for instance, when she and Tim set out to play games in Fun City: “And so into the dark streets they went, walking across shadows, scuttling against the wind which tried to push them back into the amusement arcade” (The Great Fire of London 9). Later on, when she identifies herself as Little Dorrit and is dismissed from her job, in which she has lost all interest, she scarcely leaves her home at all, save for occasional night wanderings over the site of the old Marshalsea prison in order to discover who her newly emerging identity is, “looking for clues, some kind of old marks” (The Great Fire of London 97), and the two instances when she attempts to sabotage the film through which she believes “they” intend to take hold of the poor little girl’s souls: she at first physically attacks the actress who is playing Amy Dorrit and eventually, when she feels such sporadic actions have little impact on the evil plotting of her abstract arch-enemies, she sets the film’s London sets on fire. For Tim, London at first represents a familiar habitat which, nevertheless, always offers something new to discover, especially when he is assisting Rowan in tracing its lost places, like the original site of the Marshalsea Prison. Although the intellectually uninvolved Tom understands it merely as a game and shows little interest in the historical facts behind the lost areas, seeing them as ‘stories, fairy tales, not connected with the reality of any place” (The Great Fire of London 31), he still considers it an amusing complementary activity to his routine life. Yet for him, London quickly transforms from an exciting puzzle to a confusing maze when he loses Audrey, and later Rowan as well, and suddenly finds himself searching not for the enigmatic, lost city, but for a firm point in the actual city that would help him find his former, light-hearted and self-assured, self: “he was baffled; he needed guidance, and he would take it from wherever it came” (The Great Fire of London 143). Letty’s states of mind are closely influenced by her impressions and perceptions of the city. When she starts her affair with Andrew she suddenly feels free to do what she likes regardless of the prospective consequences for other people’s lives. It is only the disclosure of what Andrew is really like that opens her eyes and she during her, now more and more frequent, long walks through the streets keeps scrutinising the passers-by’s faces “as if they contained some secret of life which she might summon up within herself” (The Great Fire of London 115), looking for “signs of an unhappiness similar to her own” (The Great Fire of London 134), as only during these aimless wanderings without purpose “the fullness of the city presented itself to her” (The Great Fire of London 116). When she feels abandoned and betrayed by Andrew, her despair is suddenly detectable from all she observes around, which intensifies her suffering but, at the same time, offers her certain comfort as “the whole city was undergoing some fundamental deterioration which marked its inhabitants like the evidence of some ugly disease” (The Great Fire of London 135). Once again, the parallel with Dickens’s Little Dorrit suggests itself here, as the mood and atmosphere of some of the novel’s city scenes reflect its author’s current state of mind. In the final days of 1885 Dickens worked on the depiction of the heroine’s passage though the slums of London. It had been a hard year for the writer as he had been slowly recovering from a bad cold and eye infection, while simultaneously moving between London and Paris, and so he felt tired, overworked, and depressed, associating his distress with the urban milieu. And so, under these circumstances, he became absorbed in the gloomy tones of his narrative and it soon grew much beyond its intended scope: “The rushing tide and the shadows. The sounding of the clocks.The homeless.The drunken. The vision of Whitechapel Workhouse is here enlarged and deepened, bringing with it all of the weariness and sadness which Dickens now associated with the city” (Ackroyd, Dickens 390). Such imagery resembles Rowan’s and Letty’s mental images of the city. It is notable that the text which serves Ackroyd as the thread sewing together the unfortunate fates of his London characters was in part written for auto-therapeutic purposes, one in which the city becomes a self-reflective metaphor of not only its characters” but also its author’s troubled psyche. The setting of Little Dorrit thus transforms into the city of the mind as much as that of The Great Fire of London.For Spenser Spender, London is an infinitely fascinating puzzle whose diverse mechanisms no one can ever fully know, but which is still worth exploring. Spenser also believes that Charles Dickens was one of the few who were close to understanding the city and its inhabitants’ ways and acts. As a film director, his ambition is to make a film about his beloved city which would authentically capture its spirit, and so he chooses to film Dickens’s LittleDorrit, from which he planned to remove all the parts that take place outside London. Having conceived this plan, he is already imagining the particular London scenes and sequences, as a result of which he becomes so excited that he suddenly sees himself as being part of one great London tradition, linked with all its other inhabitants, present, past and future, which endows him with invincible vigour and vitality. Indeed, Spenser draws much of his creative and working energy from the city, and it is the city that gives him the strength and optimism for his planning of the final grand, panoramic London scene of his film, despite the restrictive financial measures of the film company’s financial managers. Though reconciled with the fact that his original project has been doomed, he still, at least in his imagination, projects a vision “of London, crowded, packed with life, with the figures of Little Dorrit, Mr Dorrit and Little Mother the simpleton moving haphazardly through the crowd—but not lost within that crowd, rather sustained by its energy and momentum, feeling the impetus of a shared life” (The Great Fire of London 157).Ackroyd’s novel is a typical example of postmodern pastiche, in the sense of a combination of elements from one or more texts and a cross-reading of separate texts. Certain elements in the novel are taken from Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s historical novel. The most relevant is the image of London burning suggested in the titleand dominant at the story’s conclusion. The Great Fire became a symbol both of punishment for sins and catharsis (the fire helped to clear out the last traces of the plague), of destruction as well as regeneration (after the fire London was rebuilt and expanded). In A Child’s History of England Dickens mentions the rumour according to which Catholics had “wilfully set London in flames” (367) and dismisses it as “a malicious and stupid untruth”(368). Roy Porter establishes this connection between the Great Fire and the Gordon Riots in his London: A social History (389). Anti-Catholic feelings can be considered as a further element of similarity between the two episodes. During the Great Fire prisoners in the Fleet had to be released, and this can be seen as a further connection between the two great crises in the history of London and the same situation of prisoners getting released can be seen in The Great Fire of London.Peter Ackroyd, who, like Dickens, can be considered a city novelist, must have easily grasped the emblematic connection between the two great London crises, and has also captured two more interesting elements in Dickens’s representation of the Gordon Riots: the centrality of madness and prison and the gap between the grand image of the insurrection and the meanness of the characters involved. Many parodic effects in the last chapters of Ackroyd’s novel derive from his carrying to the extreme Dickens’s humorous or satiric intention. In the episode of the burning of the film set a diminutive version of London is burnt down and the people involved are a crazy girl, a gay academic and an idealistic filmmaker, the last of whom actually dies in the fire. In the following and final scene in chapter 28, Little Arthur tampers with the prison’s electrical equipment, causing an explosion which allows the prisoners to escape. Of course this last episode could be a reference to the collapse of the Clennams’ house announced by “a sudden noise like thunder”(Little Dorrit 862), as we know, the house is throughout compared to a prison. It is easy, however, to find also a connection with the climax in Barnaby Rudge when the London mob, after committing arson all over the City, set fire to Newgate and release the prisoners. In the biography for instance we find an enthusiastic assessment of the Gordon-Riots episode in Barnaby Rudge: “the scenes of burning London in the novel are some of the most extraordinary in all of his fiction” (Ackroyd, Dickens 352). What Ackroyd is probably focusing on is Dickens’s attitude to history as he was deeply interested in the narrative potential of historical facts. Ackroyd shares with Dickens, among other things, the conviction of the essentially theatrical nature of London. In London: the Biography (2000), Ackroyd mentions a number of literati who commented on and relished the city’s theatricality, such as William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Thomas Babington Macaulay and James Boswell. The most notable of these, however, was Charles Dickens, for whom London was the “magic lantern” which filled his imagination with the glimpse of strange dramas and sudden spectacles” (Ackroyd, London 142). In this view, the life of the city consists of an infinite number of more or less unrelated scenes in which the citizens temporarily turn into performers, assuming various roles, disguises and identities, which is why, Ackroyd believes, “London has always been considered to be the home of stock theatrical characters” (Ackroyd, London142). Ackroyd’s London is primarily a literary city whose texture is woven from a limitless number of texts it has produced or inspired to be produced. This city is distinctly intertextual and palimpsestic, as the individual texts are not only variously related to one another, but they are also layered on one another, each new text trying to rewrite some of the previously created ones. In The Great Fire of London, the city’s literariness is explored through the personality of Charles Dickens, whose work Ackroyd considers visionary if not genius, and his novel Little Dorrit. Dickens is here celebrated as a writer who indeed did understand London and the complicated mechanisms of the city’s functioning, and as such becomes an object of both adoration and serious academic research (reflecting, in fact, Ackroyd’s own attitude to the great Victorian writer). Moreover, his Little Dorrit not only inspires the structure and character construction of The Great Fire of London through the already mentioned plot and character parallelism, but it also, to various degrees, directly and indirectly, affects the fates of most of its main protagonists. Therefore, The Great Fire of London can be understood as a homage to Charles Dickens as a London writer, one of the few who was able to capture and render the city’s spirit in his novels, and also able to portray the multifaceted and ambivalent personality of its dwellers.Emma Tennant’s Heathcliff’s Tale is also a novel that is concerned not only with the novel it intends to rewrite, Wuthering Heights in this case, but also with the figure of the author and the social environment along with the geographical landscape in which the novel was written. It comprises of various fragments of narratives, depositions, letters and diaries and is interspersed throughout with Editor’s comments. Like the other postmodern novels of Emma Tennant such as Tess, discussed in another chapter, Heathcliff’s Tale is also part metafiction, part biography and part literary criticism. It starts with a preface in the form of editor’s note, apparently written in the contemporary England, that informs us that a collection of documents pertaining to be a kind of manuscript and comprising of various fragments and letters has come for auction which “may help to elucidate one of literature’s greatest enigma’s: the origins of the most evil hero ever to be portrayed”. Secondly, the manuscript traces the “causes and reasons behind the authorship of the great novel in which this demonic figure appears”. The novel is an attempt to ascertain “how could a young woman with no experience of the world—or indeed, of passion—have brought into being a man such as Heathcliff?(1)”In this quest for the truth behind the authorship of Wuthering Heights, the novel introduces us to the character of Henry Newby who is supposedly a nephew of Thomas Newby, the publisher of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. He is sent by his uncle toHaworth Parsonage, the famous residence of the Bronte sisters, to collect a manuscript reportedly written by Emily Bronte in the last days of her life and for which the publishers had paid an advance of 25 pounds. They assert that the manuscript, if it exists, is their property and Henry Newby is determined to claim it on their behalf. He reaches Haworth Parsonage on the New Year’s Eve of 1849, a few weeks after Emily’s death, in extreme bad weather and is in the danger of being turned out on the stormy night by a woman of “peremptory voice”, addressed as Miss Charlotte by the servant who takes pity on him and hides him in the downstairs study. There he comes across a bundle of papers thrown on the fire for burning which he snatches from the fire and finds to be an account by Lockwood of his return to the Wuthering Heights after the events of the famous novel by that name. As such, the manuscript is in the form of a sequel to Wuthering Heights but due to his ignorance of literary matters, Newby takes Lockwood and Heathcliff to be real personages and fails to realise that the papers in his possession are part of the same manuscript he has come to collect and which Charlotte Bronte is trying to burn when she is interrupted by his arrival. There have been rumours of an unpublished fragment of a manuscript left behind by Emily Bronte which Charlotte Bronte is accused of having burned after Emily’s death. Emma Tennant takes that rumour as a serious possibility and builds her novel around that.The biography of the Bronte sisters and their brother Branwell plays a very important part in this metafiction. Henry Newby’s misconceptions about there being a writer named Ellis Bell are put to rest the next day by the landlord of the Black Bull, when he goesto get some information about Ellis Bell and Heathcliff whose identity is equally a mystery to him—in fact he has mistaken first the Reverend Patrick Bronte and next the sexton as being Heathcliff. This is the infamous tavern where Branwell Bronte is supposed to have drunk himself to death and where Emily would “wait up for him half the night, for fear the parson would come to know of Master Branwell’s drinking” (70-71). The story of the Bronte siblings that is told to Newby comes as a surprise to him as well as to the reader when it is hinted that (“Master Branwell, he was writing when he died. His sister cared for him when he was poorly, she’d do anything for him”) Branwell was the real author of the manuscript and by implication, of Wuthering Heights as well for both writings are written in the same style (71). In the beginning of the novel itself it has been remarked that:An altercation has already broken out between various factions…..Branwellites and Emily-supporters are evenly distributed, when it comes to deciding the thorny problem of whose hand was responsible for this ‘second novel’. (Heathcliff’s Tale 1)The remaining pages of the manuscript are handed over to Newby by another drinker in the tavern who claims to have been given those papers by Branwell himself. This part of the manuscript encloses a letter by Heathcliff to Lockwood telling him about his adventures in the New World which leave him with enough money to come back to Wuthering Heights and buy Hindley Earnshaw, the despotic brother of Catherine, out of his inheritance. Another important part of this manuscript is “Isabella’s story”, a kind of journal kept by Isabella, the sister of Edgar Linton and Catherine’s sister-in-law, which describes the events subsequent to Heathcliff’s return from her perspective. Heathcliff courts Isabella only to gain access to Catherine and marries her as a kind of revenge. According to this version of the story Cathy and Heathcliff consummate their love for each other and Cathy’s daughter Catherine Linton is actually Heathcliff’s daughter. As Catherine later marries Linton, Heathcliff’s son by Isabella, this opens up the possibility of the marriage being incestuous. This is supposed to be the final secret revealed by the manuscript but there are other, more dramatic conclusions drawn from this assumption. The editor’s note inserted here raises more questions than it answers:The fact that the script closely resembles that of Branwell Bronte is of enduring fascination. If Branwell was the author of this ‘letter’, is it proof of his identification with Heathcliff? If this is the case, did the drunken failure in whom the family placed all their hopes, entertain a passion for his sister Emily which sparked the incestuous love (for many considered Heathcliff to have been old Earnshaw’s son) between the devil and Cathy? This possibility has been ignored in recent biographies of the poet and the author of Wuthering Heights but we feel duty bound to record it here. (Heathcliff’s Tale 75)During the course of the novel, many speculations regarding the plot and characters of Wuthering Heights are put to rest. Hindley is conclusively shown to have been murdered by Heathcliff, Heathcliff to be the illegitimate son of Joseph Earnshaw and Catherine Linton to be the daughter of Heathcliff. Ultimately, towards the end of the novel, Henry Newby concedes the authorship of Wuthering Heights to Emily Bronte despite the claims made by the sexton John Brown to the contrary who urged him to write a biography of Branwell to prove that he was the real author of the novel:a biography which set out to prove a lie. I knew that Branwell Bronte was not the author of Wuthering Heights; he might have invented some of the continuation of the story…and he might yet supply a footnote in history as one who had followed his sister in her extraordinary venture. But Branwell was not a writer….I could not and would not defame the true author of a masterpiece in order to please a publisher or for financial gain. Emily with her ‘little lamp’ must shine unburnished for eternity. (Heathcliff’s Tale 157-58)During the course of writing and researching for that biography Henry Newby comes across the famous juvenilia of the Bronte children, the fantastic tales about the mythical kingdoms of Angria and Gondal belonging to Emily and Branwell respectively. Reference is also made to the imaginary character of Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland that Branwell loved to enact. The novel had started with two questions—one regarding the authorship of Wuthering Heights which has been settled here in favour of Emily Bronte—and the second about the inspiration or source for the character of Heathcliff. By making extensive use of biography and literary tradition regarding the Brontes, Tennant presents Branwell as the source of Heathcliff and Branwell’s love for Emily as the inspiration for Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship which remains platonic at least in Wuthering Heights. To prove this point Tennant introduces a sighting of the ghosts of Emily and Branwell kissing each other by Newby when he goes to Top Withens, an old and dilapidated farmhouse at the top of a moor that supposedly served as a model for Wuthering Heights. Tenant also refers to the influence of the Romantics, particularly Byron, on the fertile imagination of the Bronte children that might have led to tragic incidents of their lives: For the Earl of Northangerland, the diminutive, bespectacled Branwell Bronte, has at thirteen years of age discovered the truth of the ‘bad things’ for which the great Lord Byron had been known…Branwell, now transmogrifying from Alexander Percy to the great poet himself, has found and ordered the volume which outlines his hero’s crimes….and it is as George Gordon, Lord Byron that he swaggers down the bedroom passage and tries the faulty handle on Lady Augusta’s door……(Heathcliff’s Tale 166-67)That door belongs to the bedroom shared by Emily and Charlotte Bronte as has been shown earlier and where Emily is now alone as Charlotte has gone to school. The novel ends on this note of a veiled comment on the relations between the two Bronte siblings.Heathcliff’s Tale is thus fiction, metafiction, biography and literary criticism rolled into one. Emma Tennant’sTwo Women of London, on the other hand, is a very close rewriting of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for it follows with deliberation most of the stages of the narrative by Stevenson. The main difference is that where Stevenson’s tale has a male narrator and a cast of characters who are exclusively male, the narrator and characters of Two Women of London are female. Dr Jekyll has become the beautiful, sophisticated and affluent Eliza Jekyll whose luxurious apartment is connected at the back to the miserable rooms of Mrs Hyde. In Stevenson’s novel also it is discovered that the house where Mr Hyde lives is actually a back entrance to Dr Jekyll’s house and the two houses are in fact connected. The narrative takes the form of an elaborate reconstruction of the case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde by an unnamed editor-narrator who joins together video footage, taped interviews, letters and other forms of testimony from a number of middle class women inhabiting Nightingale Crescent in West London. When the narrative opens, the people of the area have been terrorized by the attacks of a serial rapist. The crucial event in the narrative is the killing of a man thought to be the rapist by Mrs Hyde, a man who turns out to be an innocent local businessman and magistrate, the Honourable Jeremy Toller – an event corresponding to the motiveless and unprovoked killing of the MP Sir Danvers Carew by Mr Hyde in the Stevenson story. Just as in the original, the narrative ends with the testimony or statement of the Jekyll figure Eliza Jekyll. The novel opens as the enquiry into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Frances Crane, the female counterpart of Dr Lanyon in Stevenson’s story who was a colleague of Dr Jekyll and knew the secret of the transformation. Like Dr Lanyon Dr Frances has also left behind a message, in this case it is an audio cassette, not to be opened till the disappearance of Eliza Jekyll, and all the attempts of the narrator to discover the contents are foiled by Jean Hastie – the lawyer and female version of Mr Utterson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde –who is in charge of the will of Eliza Jekyll, favouring Mrs Hyde just as in the original text Dr Jekyll makes a will in favour of Mr Hyde, and other documents. It is only six months later, and after the disappearance of Eliza Jekyll after a supposed violent altercation with Mrs Hyde that the narrator has access to the message which reveals how Eliza Jekyll, from being a beautiful and graceful young woman, degenerated into depression and premature old age because of her circumstances. She contracted an ill-fated marriage which ended in a failure and she was left with no money and with two children to look after she had no option but to go on Social Security. She lost her beauty, her stature even, she developed a stoop that made her hunchbacked and bowlegged and it was during this time that she became psychotic and started drinking and hitting her children. She was referred to Dr Frances Crane who prescribed a hormonal drug, the side effects of which were unknown to her. While Mrs Hyde was on this drug she discovered that if she took this drug in combination with another drug prescribed by a more unscrupulous doctor, she could regain her old beauty, youth and persona. She started going out once again under her maiden name of Eliza Jekyll and got a job and rented a room at the back of her old flat, to be easily approachable to her children. Just as in Stevenson’s story, the sought after transformation becomes increasingly difficult to achieve and there is the same incident of the reversion to the baser self while asleep. The same sequence of a message to the doctor to go to Jekyll’s house and bring a drawer containing the drug and the appearance of the ulterior ego to claim it and the transformation before the eyes of the doctor is repeated here almost verbatim from the original text. This is the shock, again like the original Stevenson story, and the guilt of having contributed to this degeneration of Mrs Hyde with the need to keep the secret of the double identity hidden from others, that sendsthe doctor to her premature aging and untimely death. In her last testament, Eliza Jekyll admits to the two violent incidents corresponding to those in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that of attacking and injuring Sir James Lister and killing Jeremy Toller under the frustration of losing her better self and the impossibility of attaining to that state of perfection permanently.This brings us to the central deviation from the original Stevenson text in the Two Women of London by Emma Tennant. Henry Jekyll is driven initially by the desire to confront his other, to separate his sensuous, pleasure loving and pleasure seeking alter ego from his punctilious and solemn persona that is socially acceptable and honoured by all, the good and evil constituents fused together so incongruously in a single human nature. “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures”(The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 75).Having released the figure of Mr Hyde from his psychic confinement, he finds it more and more difficult to return to his “true” self. In Stevenson’s story, the singular, expansive ego attempts to give birth to its alter ego or ulterior ego and later finds it difficult and lastly impossible to revert to his original super ego despite having made a conscious decision not to indulge in the temptation of transforming himself to satisfy the baser instincts hidden within his psyche. The baser self has become the evil self and it has become so powerful that it can be suppressed only with the ever increasing dose of the concoction discovered by Dr Jekyll and when the supply of its essential constituent fails, Dr Jekyll is doomed to end his life as Mr Hyde. In Tennant’s version of the story, it is the disintegrating ego, the suffering and atrophied ulterior ego that Mrs Hyde has become, which craves the drug which will restore her self-possession. Here self-possession is a derived rather than an original effect, the transformation sought is not a reversion but a restoration of the earlier perfection of the disintegrated personality.By feminising Stevenson’s version of the male split self, Tennant draws attention to the fact that there are very few females present in Stevenson’s story, no female protagonists or even important secondary characters in the entire novel. There are three minor female characters that appear in it briefly—the first is the little girl who gets trampled underfoot by Mr Hyde in the very beginning of the story,the second is the maidservant who witnesses Hyde’s murder of Sir Danvers Carew (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 29-30). The first is a victim of Hyde’s senseless violence, the other is the helpless spectator to it, and both of these stand for a pure, mute innocence, the exact and abstracted antithesis to the evil represented by Hyde.Stevenson deliberately pits the foolish and childish innocence and the instinctive propensity to goodness generally believed to be found in women and children against the evil emanating from Hyde and in favour of the goodness and nobility represented by Sir Danvers Carew:Never (she used to say with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat, she became aware of an aged and beautiful gentleman with white hair drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman to whom at first she paid less attention. (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde29 Italics mine.)The third female who appears in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is Hyde’s housekeeper who is “ivory-faced and silvery-haired” but with “an evil face smoothed by hypocrisy” and who might have served Emma Tennant with a model for the character of Mrs Hyde in her rewriting of the story. In Tennant’s version the female characters are brought to the very centre of the story, not depicted according to the Victorian image of the woman as the angel of the house or the monster but asnormal human beings, good bad and indifferent. Emma Tennant makes the transformation take place between the two versions of womanhood—the degraded and the idealised—within the single person of a woman.Emma Tennant interrogates the latent prototypes and stresses the dichotomies and anxieties about gender that are impliedwithin The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.At the same time, she substitutes for the series of male narrators—Mr Enfield, Mr Utterson, Dr Lanyon and Dr Jekyll—a network of female narrators brought together by a single, unnamed and un-gendered narrator. The substitution of network for series means that the narrative is circular rather than linear and progressive and that Tennant’s rewriting designedly sacrifices the sense of development towards closure. In particular, the dispersal of the narrative of Mrs Hyde among a number of witnesses and narrators prevents that final authoritative act of self-immolation with which Henry Jekyll closes his—and Stevenson’s—account of his life: “Here then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that Henry Jekyll to an end” (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 88). In Tennant’s version, Jekyll/Hyde does not die, but escapes, perhaps to the continent, nor does Eliza Jekyll have the last word. Although the narrator surmises that “perhaps she has at last been able to find herself” (119), the final words of the book are the narrator’s reporting of the lawyer Jean Hastie’s– who has adopted Mrs Hyde’s children—determination to keep the wholesome and the murderous separate by protecting Mrs Hyde’s children from knowledge of their mother:I’ll make sure they don’t find the other side of this tragic victim of our new Victorian values: the word, scrawled across the pad under a list of household essentials –AjaxFish fingersKetchupMother’s PrideKILL(Two Women of London 121)Tennant has followed the storyline of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde very closely. It will be quite tedious and unnecessary to enumerate each and every instance of the events that replicate the Stevenson story. Except for the change in the style of reporting which is a collage of video films, journals, answering machine tapes and audio cassettes, each instance is an example of substituting female characters for the male and with this she has tried to bring out the essential difference between the psyche of a man and a woman. Where Stevenson’s hero is daring and adventurous and experiments with bringing out and confronting his own evil self, Tennant’s protagonist is only trying to get back to her previous excellence. The reaching after is here not for depravation but perfection, and in this sense Tennant’s version is more classical than postmodern. The conclusion to be drawn here is that Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is more experimental and ambiguous in its exploration of the underworld of human emotions and psyche than its rewriting by Emma Tennant which reaches after idealism and perfection rather than the sordid reality.Thus we see that although rewriting has long been on the postmodernist agenda, the recent spurt in rewriting the classical or canonical works has a purpose different from intertextuality or reference. The postmodern rewriters take a canonical text as the starting point and use it to deconstruct and reconstruct reality as they see fit. They are interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriate some science-fiction conventions, and exploit the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, their work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction. This practice, which is primarily an aesthetic and apolitical one in the context of postmodern rewritings of the canon, becomes highly politicised when it comes to postcolonial or feminist rewritingsas “writing against representation and realism in general is a project different in kind—not just degree—from writing against a specific political situation” (Soderlind 45) as we see in the next chapters. ................
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