Searching for the “Oedipal ogre” (HF 15), the Tantalising Figure of the Writer in Patricia Duncker’s Fiction Writing, From Hallucinating Foucault to Sophie and the Sybil

Cette communication a été filmée dans le cadre du colloque international  "Writers in Neo-Victorian Fiction" organisé par l'équipe anglophone ERIBIA le 11 octobre 2019 à la Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines de l'Université Caen Normandie, sous la responsablilité d'Armelle Parey (ERIBIA, Caen) et Charlotte Wadoux (19-21, Paris 3).

Georges Letissier is professor of English Literature at Nantes University, France. His main fields of interest are Victorian literature (Charles Dickens mostly), Modernism (Ford Madox Ford, Ronald Firbank) and contemporary British literature (notably the neo-Victorian novel). His last publications include “The Possibility of a Somatic Reading of Dickens’s Fiction”, in Reading Dickens Differently, Leon Litvak & Nathalie Vanfasse (eds), Indianapolis: Wiley-Blackwell, (Forthcoming 2020 to coincide with the Dickens sesquicentenary),  “Uncanny Repetitions. The Generative Power of the ‘Reader I Married Him Mantra’ in Tracy Chevalier’s Anthology of Short Stories”, in Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Armelle Parey (ed.), New York & London: Routledge, 2018, “The Eclipse of Heroism and the Outing of Plural Masculinities in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child”, in The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction. A Paradoxical Quest, Susana Onega & Jean-Michel Ganteau (eds), New York & London: Routledge, 2018, 42-59, “Between the ‘English nuvvle’ and the ‘Novel of Aloofness, Charles Dickens’s Proto-(High) Modernism”, in Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide, Anne Florence Gillard-Estrada & Anne Besnault Levita (eds), New York & London: Routledge, 2018. He is currently finishing a book on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, titled Middlemarch: The Higher Inward Life, coll. Intercalaires, Presses Universitaires Paris Nanterre.

Abstract

Beforeher name became associated with the neo-Victorian novel, with JamesMiranda Barry (1999) and Sophie and the Sibyl (2015),Patricia Duncker embarked on her writing character with a fictioninventing a fictitious writer, Paul Michel. Hallucinating Foucault(1996) is a mind-boggling, vertigo-inducing narrative in which anunnamed Phd student becomes amorously obsessed with the writer hestudies, Paul Michel. Michel’s creative impulse is triggered by theimage of French philosopher Michel Foucault : “the unseenreader to be courted”(35). So in this first novel Duncker wasobviously primarily concerned with the experience of writing asdriven by the desire to please, to court and to seduce a fantasisedreader. She also established the reversibility of the bond betweenPaul Michel and Michel Foucault: “He [MichelFoucault] fretted that he was not handsome. That the boys would notflock to him, court him. I lived that life for him, the life heenvied and desired.” (HF 149). In this first work, Dunckeralready displayed an unparalleled sense of place and an equallystunning capacity to render the Zeitgeist, calling up Paris inthe early eighties, the spread of the AIDS epidemics and the firstgay emancipation movements. In this respect, the haunting picture ofHervé Guibert on the page cover is iconic.  Writing is seen asan obsession, a compulsive habit, like homosexuality: “thepotentially perfect pleasure” (HF 27). All the fundamentalsof Duncker’s creation were therefore present in this first work,notably the intrinsinc link between desire, writing consubstantialwith reading and the politics inherent in the creative process. Givenher concern with reading, it is hardly surprising that Duncker shouldhave turned to the neo-Victorian, a literary subgenre known amongother things for its metatextual dimension.

Dunckerhas repeatedly alluded to her fascination for George Eliot. Indeedlike Michel Foucault and his fictionalised alter ego, Paul Michel,the Victorian writer too was a most unconventional figure. Yet, forDuncker, an admired writer should by no means be merely adulated; thehagiographic mode is totally alien to her mindset. Precisely, thispaper argues that the “Sibyl” is depicted as a contentiousfigure, setting a challenge to a contemporary woman novelist. So, byplacing the famous Victorian woman novelist at the centre of herneo-Victorian fiction Duncker pursues, albeit in a more jocular mood,one of her chief concerns, i.e. the postmodernist, self-reflexiveinvestigation of the reading/writing experience within the limits ofa highly entertaining and extremely erudite narrative.