In my discussion of The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde I already stressed the point that in examining literary history Peter Ackroyd emphasizes its essentially intertextual nature. This, however, becomes even more apparent in Chatterton, where Ackroyd, in fact, makes Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) the emblem of intertextuality itself. In various literary histories, Chatterton has been accused of imitation and plagiarism, even of deceiving and forgery (cf. The Rowley Poems, ed. Hare, 1991: xxvi), so here Ackroyd sees an issue which simply needs to be re-examined - especially when his own works, too, as we have seen, contain strong elements of imitation and pastiche. Consequently, through the means of fiction, Ackroyd seeks to deconstruct such negative views about Chatterton's poetry as well as to question the historical 'truth' about the poet. Ackroyd makes us see Chatterton, the 'forger', in a new light through the eyes of postmodernism and poststructuralism. He, as it were, gives his own definition of the poet and at the same time gets to explore the questions of imitation and parody, originality and forgery, even further.
In the following chapter 3.1. I shall explore Ackroyd's treatment of imitation and plagiarism, whereas the chapter 3.2. will concentrate on the deconstruction of canonized 'truths', such as totalizing views about history. Further, these two issues, intertextuality and deconstruction, are closely interrelated in the novel, so in the chapter 3.3. I shall offer my interpretation of why this is so.
Chatterton is a complex, postmodern novel, with a fragmented structure and multiple plots that echo and mirror each other. The novel takes us to three different centuries and ties together the lives of Thomas Chatterton, George Meredith and Ackroyd's own creation, Charles Wychwood. These different story lines are unified by a strong thematic design that not only centres around Chatterton but also circles around issues as varied as death and the representations of it, history and the question of truth, and life and immortality through art. The novel shows that history gains its continuity through art, and death itself can be overcome by it, but ultimately Chatterton asks what art actually is: Is only originality and uniquenessgood art, or do imitations have their value as well? What, in fact, is an imitation - is it plagiarism, borrowing or even a theft or a forgery? Or are imitation and intertextuality, after all, just common properties of all art?
Such questions are relevant in a novel where most characters are dealing with art, often with imitations and forgeries. The main plot concerns Charles Wychwood's discovery and attempts to solve the mystery of a painting and a manuscript which seem to prove that Chatterton not only forged the poems of a medieval monk, Rowley, but also counterfeited his own suicide in order to produce even more forgeries, such as poems by Blake, Gray, Cowper and others - until, of course, these documents themselves are revealed to be fakes and imitations. Similarly, while Henry Wallis paints the picture of Chatterton's death, George Meredith, the model, is impersonating Chatterton, and their discussion revolves around the question, whether this image will eventually be remembered as the true Chatterton. Charles' wife, Vivien, works in an art gallery, which itself deals with forgers such as Stewart Merk. Harriet Scrope, in her turn, is a novelist and a plot stealer, who is unable to write her memoirs for the fear of being found out; she does not want to admit her borrowings. Her friend, Sarah Tilt, "the famous art critic", is writing a treatise about representations of death, such as the one in Wallis' painting. Andrew Flint, moreover, is a novelist and a biographer, currently writing a book about Meredith. Finally, to add to this already complicated tangle of plots, there is the librarian, Philip Slack, another friend of Charles's, who himself once attempted to write a novel but eventually abandoned it:
[N]ot only had he written with painful slowness and uncertainty, but even the pages he had managed to complete seemed to him to be filled with images and phrases from the work of other writers whom he admired. It had become a patchwork of other voices and other styles...[with] the overwhelming difficulty of recognizing his own voice among them. (C: 70).
Ackroyd's characters, in other words, are in one way or another faced with issues of intertextuality, and the description of Philip's unfinished novel very much resembles Kristeva's (1969: 146) view of language as "mosaique de citations"or Roland Barthes' (1977: 145) idea of texts as "echo chambers", thus proving the point that Ackroyd is well aware of current theories of intertextuality.
Yet, the fact that these characters are almost excessively caught up in such matters of art and writing has more serious purposes than merely to produce an ironically complicated web of plots. Of course this kind of permutation of the same issues in constantly similar story lines is part of Ackroyd's postmodern playfulness, but more specifically, the purpose of these plots - which not simply are about imitation but which also imitate each other - is to draw our attention to the idea that there are "only a limited number of plots in the world" (C: 70) and that "Everything is copied" (93). So, to give an example, Philip finds out that
Harriet Scope had written a novel in which a writer's secretary was responsible for many of her employer's 'posthumous' publications; she knew her style so well that she was able effortlessly to counterfeit it, and only the assiduous researches of a biographer had uncovered the fakery. (69).
Harriet's novel self-reflexively copies and permutates the story of Stewart Merk's forgeries (112-4) but also the novel's story of Chatterton itself, who as Ackroyd suggests, forged a number of poems by his dead or already declining contemporaries. Yet, somewhat ironically, Philip notices that Harriet's plot (about a fakery) is itself stolen from Harrison Bentley's novel, The Last Testament, where quite similarly,
the biographer of a certain poet...discovers that his subject, at the end of his life, had been too ill to compose the verses that brought him eternal fame; that in fact, it had been the poet's wife who had written them for him. (69).
The same plots, in other words, occur over and over again, with ever new variations. But the point is even further underlined in the fact that Bentley's novel, The Last Testament, actually echoes that what Ackroyd himself had done in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, that is, written a book that Wilde somehow did not manage to do - a book, moreover, which would possibly have restored Wilde's good name.And what is even more, in Dan Leno there is yet another variation of the same story when Elizabeth Cree completes her husband's unfinished play after his failure (this time without literary success, though). So Chatterton is a real 'echo chamber', and self-consciously so: Philip "dropped...[the book], and its fall echoed in the basement of the library." (C: 69).
Clearly Ackroyd is not one to shrink from open plagiarism, even plagiarism from himself, but the essential point in Chatterton is to convince us that there is really nothing unusual in a poet or a novelist using other writers' material; whether they admit it or not, all writers are copycats: "'Well you know these writers. They'll steal any...'(...) 'Anything, that's right.'" (100). "Yes, everyone copies" (106), repeats Charles, who in general is not worried about the idea. Harriet Scrope and Philip Slack, in their turn, are anxious about it, although Philip in a way admits his influences, while Harriet does not. Further, we also notice that Thomas Chatterton, too, was well aware of these issues of influence and imitation:
Now Rowlie ynne these mokie Dayes
Sendes owte hys shynynge Lyghte
And Turgotus and Chaucer live
Inne every Line hee wrytes. (C: 87/ The Rowley Poems: 27)
Here Chatterton confesses his indebtedness to medieval writers, but on the other hand these lines were written by the fictional 'Rowley', whereas Chatterton himself had to conceal his imitations from his contemporaries for fear of being accused of forgery.It is true that other literary 'frauds' of the 18th century, such as James Macpherson's 'Ossian' or Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, more or less retained their popularity even after being exposed as pure fabrications, but who would bother to read some obscure imitations and forgeries by a mere boy and an attorney's apprentice? (The Rowley Poems, ed. Hare, 1911: xxvi).
By his all-encompassing theme of intertextuality, however, Ackroyd specifically aims to problematize the notion of forgery. If indeed everything is copied, as Ackroyd and other intertextualists, such as Kristeva (1969), Barthes (1977) or Plett (1991), assure us, then the line between 'fake' and 'genuine' becomes blurred: "Is the work of Rowley a forgery? (...) Is it not, as the Platonists tell us, an imitation in a world of Imitations?" (C: 91). Such a question is even more pressing in our own time of postmodern 'simulacras' and 'hyperreality', where television and media 'simulate' or actually create the world we live in; where such simulated reality is eventually more real than the real itself (cf. Baudrillard, 1981); and where 'genuine' products, for instance, are constantly advertised but are never to be found among their endless copies of mass-production. Therefore, as a true deconstructionist, Ackroyd goes so far as to suggest that a genuine fake is better than a fake genuine, and applies this idea to Chatterton:
'The Fame of a great Plagiarist?'
'No, the Fame of a great Poet. You prove your Strength by doing their Work better than ever they could, and then by also doing your own.' (91).
Following this logic, we get the equation that Chatterton's skills in imitation are by no means forgery but "the truest Poetry" (87).
Still, Ackroyd's problematizing of forgery is not only directed against literature but to the art of painting as well. Consequently, the question whether the latest Seymour's are forgeries or not remains intriguingly unsolved when Stewart Merk reveals that as years went by he came to know his employer's painting style so well that he actually assisted him in completing his final paintings. "I painted all of Seymour's last pictures" (114), so "who is to say what is fake and what is real?" (113). Similar questions animate the discussion between George Meredith and his painter, concerning Wallis's 'realistic' picture about Chatterton. "I see," Meredith says. "So the greatest realism is also the greatest fakery?" (139).
Certainly Ackroyd forces us to reconsider the notion of forgery - what is genuine and what is not - but even as he does so, he also seeks to undermine the idea of artistic originality - at least as it is understood in the Romantic sense. The Romantics believed that true originality was to be found in the minds of rare individuals of natural genius, who would not have to depend on thoughts of others in their invention of universal truths. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) William Wordsworth wrote, "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1963: 266); a poet is a man who "has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing...those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immidiate external excitement." (ibid: 256). Yet Ackroyd shows that such an idea is absurd; no one can raise above one's historical or cultural context simply by means of his 'innate' imagination or emotions:
Sarah took up a catalogue...and read out the summary (...): 'Fritz Dangerfield's composition, The Opium Dream. He painted the same picture over and over again but would not be parted from the canvases, which he kept in his bedroom until his death. He did not speak, and he did not write except with an alphabet of his own invention.' She closed the catalogue. 'Now that really is madness.' (C: 116).
Here we have a case of ultimate Romantic originality: a man who wanted to be separate from everything, to be cut off from any external influences on his art. "As a result he was unintelligible. No one can start all over again" (116), "Where there is no tradition, art simply becomes primitive. Artists without any proper language can only draw like children" (110). Ackroyd makes us see the implications of intertextuality: in the light of the view, by now established, that all texts are intertexts (Plett, 1991: 6), the Romantic myth of original genius becomes to be seen as an impossible fancy.
Yet even as these myths are broken - plagiarism, forgery, Romantic originality - Ackroyd's characters still suffer from anxieties: hopes of immortality, fame and recognition, or fears of one's works being ignored, forgotten in the dusty shelves of bookstores or libraries (e.g. 102). Charles says, "It's called the anxiety of influence" (100), which of course refers to Harold Bloom's (1975) theory of poetry: the dread every major poet feels of the weight of tradition before him; the fear that coming late in literary history, one's precursors have already exhausted all the available inspiration (Selden & Widdowson, 1993: 153), resulting in "the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?" (Bloom, 1975: 2). Of the novel's characters, Philip Slack responds most forcibly to this oppressive feeling: since he could not find his own voice out of the multitude of others, he decided to abandon his novel altogether. Charles's situation is opposite, but not any better: since he has "no intention of yielding to the conventional anxieties about recognition" (C: 15), we see that his long poem, too, remains unfinished, as he works slowly and infrequently. With such examples, Ackroyd seems to suggest that the anxiety of influence is an issue which needs to be tackled and eventually overcome if one wishes to be a successful writer. The weight of tradition cannot simply be ignored, but neither should it be allowed to crush one altogether, which is a view, of course, that is in harmony with Bloom's theory.
The anxiety of influence in general is a feeling that has clearly obsessed Peter Ackroyd. Chatterton as a whole can be seen as a response to it; a kind of attempt to vanquish the horror of indebtedness by thematizing it, and so at the same time vindicating one's art. Certainly Ackroyd returns to the same theme over and over again in his works: English Music (1992), for example, is an elaborate allegory of the anxiety of influence, dealing with a father and son relationship, where Clement Harcombe, a medium and a spiritual healer, teaches his son, Timothy, the delights of English literature, culture and history. During the course of the novel, Timothy - exactly as Bloom (1975: 121-2) theorizes - oversteps his father, and the novel ends up with the father dead, whereas Timothy himself takes over his father's place and continues his work in entertaining and 'healing' people. Meanwhile on another level, English Music draws its textual energy from the works of its literary fathers - Malory, Bunyan, Blake, Defoe, Dickens, Doyle, etc. - and by creative misreading 'kills', or at least rises above them, finding a light of its own despite the shadows these 'fathers' cast. Thus Bloom's (1975) literary application of the Freudian argument that the sons need to "contest" (122) and at last "destroy" (121) their precursors in order to 'live' is reflected in both the content and the construction of the novel.
Also in The House of Doctor Dee (1993) one of the worst nightmares in that gothic monster of a novel is the same terror again - the anxiety of influence:
I confess to one obsession, or fear. It always visits me when I am inside the house at my writing-desk, and rarely follows me beyond these walls (...) - this fear that whatever I happen to be writing comes from another source, that I'm stealing someone else's plot or words, that I'm relying upon the themes or images of another novelists. (...) And this is the strangest anxiety of all - what if that other person were actually within me all the time? (...) And then yesterday, it happened at last. (...) My book had been written before. I was convinced of it. (...) I had copied another novel word for word. Even the title was the same. (...) Then I began what I knew to be a fatal search (...) And then I found it. There was a book here with the title I had only recently chosen...This was the novel I had just written. (...) But am I, even now, writing what others have written before me? And if this is so, what am I to do? (The House of Doctor Dee: 222-4).
There is genuine horror in these lines, but at the same time this is an elaborate joke on Ackroyd's part. After all, in his works, such as Last Testament, English Music, Dan Leno or Chatterton he has shown that he is not afraid to rely on other novelists' texts; that his specific answer to the anxiety of influenceis not to hide it but to deal with it directly: to raise above one's influences by openly exposing one's sources and pre-texts and by thematizing intertextuality itself. Ackroyd shows that by self-conscious imitation and open plagiarism one really leaves no room for accusations of influence or indebtedness. Instead, one can show one's creativeness by making us see what one does for one's source-texts which anyone can go and check afterwards, if they wish to do so. Since "everyone copies" (C: 106), why not do that oneself, too?
Obviously, this is where Thomas Chatterton becomes important. As Ackroyd writes, "Chatterton knew that original genius consists in forming new and happy combinations, rather than searching after thoughts and ideas which had never occurred before" (C: 58). Chatterton, in other words, is made no less than an ideal representative of an intertextual writer:
My Method was as follows: I had already around me, in Volumes taken from my Father's shelves or purchas'd from the Booksellers, Charters and Monuments and such like Stuff; to these I added my Readings from Ricat, Stow, Speed, Holinshed, Leland and many another purveyor of Antiquity. If I took a passage from each, be it ever so short, I found that in Unison they became quite a new Account and, as it were, Chatterton's Account. (C: 85).
Chatterton's Account is given a central place in Ackroyd's art philosophy since it is not only openly intertextual but it also shows that by such a method a writer can solve the problem of the anxiety of influence: by consciously using earlier texts as the basis of one's works, one is in full control of one's writing - one is not merely passively influenced by the texts of others; one is using them actively, re-arranging these sources as one's own text, and at one's own free will. The result may be a new combination of texts which to a certain extent resembles its predecessors but which also reads like no other text before it.
Such a view of intertextuality, implicitly or explicitly expressed in Chatterton, is significant in that it restores the authority of the writing subject that Kristeva and Barthes (in articles such as "Word, Dialogue, and Novel" or "The Death of the Author") sought to undermine in their leftist radicalism of the 1960's Tel Quel movement (see also Friedman, S., "Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author" in Clayton & Rothstein (ed.), 1991: 146-61). In Ackroyd's model, authorship is not undermined by intertextuality, as it was for the French poststructuralist. For Ackroyd the author is still a meeting point between various texts and discourses; he is the crossroads where numerous texts "blend and clash" (Barthes, 1977: 146-61), but the radical poststructuralist emphasis is re-shifted when he shows through Thomas Chatterton that a poet or an author does not have to be at a total mercy of these discourses; he can still adapt, assimilate, transform, alter, reshape, revise or misread the precursors' texts as his own text (cf. Bloom, 1975: 14-6, or Clayton & Rothstein, ed., 1991: 155). Intertextuality for Ackroyd is still a feature of all writing, but an artist can assert his strength and even independence by active intertextuality and open plagiarism. As Ackroyd's Chatterton sums it up: "Thus do we see in every Line an Echoe, for the truest Plagiarism is the truest Poetry" (87).
Interestingly, in re-asserting the author's position as an active text (re)producer, Ackroyd takes a step further from that of his views in Notes (1976), where he more or less merely echoed the theories of the French poststructuralists. In Chatterton Ackroyd may be said to articulate the position he had already adopted in his biographies, where he no longer emphasized the autonomy of language at the expense of authorship but, rather, sought to combine the methods of intertextuality with the idea of the later T. S. Eliot, who said, "We also understand the poetry better when we know more about the man" (T. S. Eliot: 335). In his essay on 'Modernism' (1976) Ackroyd spoke for the theories of Barthes and Derrida, but by Chatterton Ackroyd seems to be more at home with the Anglo-Saxon and American tradition of literary criticism - theorists such as Jonathan Culler or Harold Bloom, who have never really accepted the French ideas of the 'death of the author'. Ackroyd's view, in fact, comes very close to that of Oscar Wilde, who said, "It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything" (quoted in Ellmann, 1987: 155). This view is in exact harmony with those ideas expressed in Chatterton, as indeed are the views of T. S. Eliot and his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920), condensed into the famous dictum: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" (quoted in Cowart, 1993: 1).
Chatterton as a whole, therefore, can be seen as a response to the ideas of the 'death of the author', but this is not the only significance in the novel's theoretical discussions about intertextuality: at the same time as he defends authorship, Ackroyd seeks to 'rescue' the notion of originality: even as he destroys the Romantic cult of original genius, Ackroyd does not wholly reject the concept of originality (as he does not reject authorship), but gives it a new meaning: unlike other postmodernists, like Hutcheon (1988), who have insisted that by the advent of intertextuality, there can be no such thing as originality, Ackroyd takes a step further and redefines 'originality' to match his intertextual view of art: "originality consists in forming new and happy combinations, rather than searching after thoughts and ideas which had never occurred before" (C: 58). The words bear repeating since they are central to Ackroyd's art philosophy and even if they resemble Bloom's (1975: 7) idea that "poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original", Ackroyd gives a more exact definition of originality than Bloom or other intertextualists. (In his theory of poetry, for example, Bloom (1975) tends to emphasize, rather vaguely, that the greater 'swerve' the poet makes from his precursor, the more original he is - without effectively taking into consideration the possibility of many influences or sources working at the same time - while Kristeva and Barthes reject the concept of originality altogether.) But Ackroyd is more precise and consistent in his model when he implies that even if texts are always based on other texts, it is still possible for writers to achieve individuality and even originality by making such combinations of already existing texts that have not been done before. In the light of such a model, works of pastiche - such as Chatterton's poems or The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, for instance - can finally be considered 'original' in the sense of being new, creatively constructed works of art, even if blatantly based on pre-existing material. And this status of originality, of course, is a position that has been denied works of pastiche in both the Romantic and the more radically poststructuralist models, such as those by Barthes and Kristeva, for example.
In Ackroyd's model, thereby, pastiche and parody are finally free from their negative connotations that have plagued the terms ever since the Romantics. This, together with the defence of authorship, can be seen as Ackroyd's contribution to current literary theory. Ackroyd is not merely echoing various theories and theorists in his novel, but out of these he formulates his own position, which nevertheless keeps within the bounds of poststructuralist thinking. Yet Ackroyd truly shows his creativeness by projecting these ideas and discourses on Thomas Chatterton and building a whole fictional world around him, with a multitude of different characters and situations that can be both amusing and touching, poignant and comical. In Ackroyd's treatment, Chatterton becomes synonymous with intertextuality, the very symbol of everything that is related to it. Philip, for example, tells Charles how Harriet Scrope's books very much resemble those by Harrison Bentley, and Charles replies,
'There you are, you see. It's catching.'
'What is?'
'Chatterton.' (C: 94).
And so it is: through Chatterton Ackroyd develops the themes of intertextuality, which affects almost every part of the novel. Especially his view of the poet - originality through pastiche and imitation, finding oneself by using the texts of others - is extended to many of the novel's characters: not only is Chatterton's plagiarism "the truest Poetry" (87), but we also see that as George Meredith is posing as Chatterton, he says, "I'm a model poet...I'm pretending to be someone else" (144). Henry Wallis, in his turn, takes the position of Meredith and says, "Don't be alarmed, George. I'm rehearsing your part. (...) The better I impersonate you...the better I paint you" (136-7).As a consequence, both artists' names live on in the famous picture, reprinted in the cover of Chatterton.
Further, Thomas Chatterton meets a "posture master" (203) and imitates him; because of this he will remember him (203). Later on he meets a hydrocephalus, an idiot boy without a name, and the same pattern emerges:
See, my name is Tom. Tom. He points to himself. Who are you?
Whoyoo? The boy kisses the doll, and then presses it against his cheek. Tom. I am Tom. Who are you?
Tom. The boy points to himself, in imitation, and smiles.(209-10).
The boy, in other words, gains his very identity by imitating Chatterton. Ever since "the idiot boy was always known as Tom" (211).
Similar examples also abound in the book's twentieth-century narrative. Edward, for instance, imitates his father's voice after Charles's death, and suddenly makes Vivien very happy: "her husband was dead and yet he was not dead" (189). Her husband would live on in Edward, Edward being a sort of 'copy' of Charles. Further, we are told that Harriet Scrope found her artistic voice only after using the plots of other novelists; she found her style through the exposure and imitation of other people's plots, just as Philip Slack "might discover that [he] had a style of [his] own, after all" (232), when he plans to write a novel based on the already existing story of the Chatterton manuscripts. Finally, even the waiter in the Indian restaurant exemplifies this all-embracing theme of uniqueness through copying:
'I have a novel,' he said. 'Good book.'
'Who wrote it?' Harriet asked sharply.
'No sir. This my idea.' And it occurred to the horrified Harriet that the waiter had a story to tell also. 'Nice modest man, correct?' He stood up straight, and flashed a smile at her. 'Now this nice man does not want to stand out from others, do you see? Too modest.' Harriet held out her glass, and he refilled it as he spoke.' But still he is odd. Very odd man.' He shook his head. 'And do you know why?' He could hardly contain himself. 'He is very odd because he tried to be exactly like everyone else. Precisely like. Good story, is that so?' (149).
Of course the waiter's already by now familiar story, along with all these other examples of imitation and intertextuality, is yet another self-referential joke that points toward the construction of Chatterton: the novel itself is an intertextual collage, which contains imitation of Chatterton's language (Chapter 6) and which is also based on already existing stories and plots, taken from the English literary history as well as other texts, novels and poems, being a real mosaic of quotations itself: the story of Thomas Chatterton, for example, is adapted from his biographies, and the plot of his forgeries, including Chatterton's forged suicide, very much resembles other stories of fakeries, such as Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of W. H." (in Savile), which contains a number of same elements, not the least of which are the forged suicide and the forged painting. The story of the Merediths - Mary eloping with the painter - is also a well documented 'plot', found in various books, just as Meredith's Modern Love (1862) is directly alluded to and further developed in Chatterton: "This is modern love, you know. Secretly we adore each other." (C: 144). The love triangle of the Merediths, moreover, is repeated in the twentieth century story line, as we notice that Vivien and Philip, too, find each other after the poet husband is dead (or in the case of Meredith, figuratively 'dead' in the canvas).
Similarly, the plots about the plagiarisms are constantly repeated with endless variations, as we have already seen. Obviously, all such intertextuality is very deliberate and, in fact, whenever he sees an opportunity for it, Ackroyd purposefully points out, or at least hints at, a similarity between his novel and other books, thus highlighting the fact that he does not want to hide his sources but rather underlines the more theoretical speculations of Chatterton by showing how intertextuality works in practice. An ironic allusion, for example, is made to the related story of the 'Ossian' fakeries when Charles sells James Macpherson's book, The Lost Art of Eighteenth Century Flute-Playing, to the junk shop, where he also finds the forged painting of another 'forger', Chatterton. Further, in Charles' funeral, Harriet says, "This reminds me of the scene from Villette" (176), and so in fact it remotely does: In Charlotte Bronte's novel the heroine buries her somewhat revealing letters in the cemetery (Villette: 305-10), and this is thematically echoed in Chatterton: as Charles gets buried, so does the mystery of the Chatterton manuscripts get 'buried' along with him, remaining in obscurity for ever.
Yet these intertextual echoes and allusions become even more self-reflexive, when we remember that a number of textual echoes are specifically made to the theories of intertextuality as such, including Barthes' concepts of 'echo chamber' and 'the death of the author' (69), Kristeva's idea of texts being 'patchworks' or 'mosaics of quotations' (70), Bloom's theory of 'the anxiety of influence' (100) and T. S. Eliot's notion that all artists steal from other artists (100). Clearly Ackroyd's metafiction has more significant purposes than the usual procedure of narcissistically pointing towards the novel's own construction; Chatterton refers to literary criticism and literary theory as a whole, giving its own interesting contribution to the poststructuralist debates about textuality and art. Yet the novel hardly becomes didactic in any negative sense, but these theories are permutated in a creative and entertaining way - always subjected to the primacy of the plot or the dramatic interest of the novel - so that anyone, also those outside literature seminars, can appreciate the ideas and the artistry of the book. The novel is not merely concerned with intellectual ideas; certainly it contains this dimension, but Ackroyd does not neglect the aesthetic or the emotional side either: all the various story lines in the different centuries possess their own special atmosphere, and so balance each other nicely. All the daring stylistic variations make the text very lively indeed (imitation of 18th-century language (81-93) is placed next to Chatterton's poems (79) and idioms of modern English (93), for instance) so that as a whole Chatterton is both funny and moving, educative and entertaining. It supplies us with all the information we need about intertextuality, or poets like Chatterton and Meredith, at the same time as we may smile at the comic portrait of Harriet Scrope or feel disquiet at the deaths of Charles Wychwood and Thomas Chatterton.
The discussion so far has explored pastiche and intertextuality. (The two terms are used almost synonymously in this study. See 1.4.1. for my clarification of 'intertextuality' and p. 19 for my definition of 'pastiche'.) Now, however, it is necessary to turn our attention to parody. For more than any other work by Ackroyd, Chatterton is involved with the subject, dealing with it both in practice and as a theme. In what follows, I shall first discuss the thematic side of parody and after that I shall show how it is used in practice - what is parodied and why, and what aims and effects can possibly lie behind Ackroyd's use of parodic techniques, especially in their relation to history.
In my discussion of Last Testament (see chapter 2.2.) I already made a distinction between pastiche and parody, and argued that parody is imitation with a subversive, ridiculing change. But only now in Chatterton does this point become really apparent: just like imitation and plagiarism, so is parody made one the central issues in Chatterton. Many of the novel's characters exemplify the uses of parody and so underline its importance for Ackroyd.
Obviously, the most important of these characters exemplifying parody is Thomas Chatterton; the "great Plagiarist" (91) is also a "great Parodist" (81). Ackroyd shows that Chatterton not only mastered medieval language, but his skills in imitation were also successfully employed in the ridicule of his contemporaries, that is, parody in the service of satire. Once in London, Chatterton notices that writing poems only is not lucrative enough:
I found that they had more need for Satires than for Songs. Of course these I compos'd willingly enough, for I hold that Man in contempt who cannot write to Measure: for the Town and Country I wrote political Satires against all Parties, Whig or Tory, Papist or Methodist; for the Political Register I compos'd meer Squibs, which they took up gladly tho' they did not know the true Range of my Shot; and knowing my own Skill in the Art of Personation, for the Court and City I set myself to write the memoirs of a sad dog (a gentleman pursewed by Bailiffs), of a malefactor chain'd in Newgate, of an old Relict thirsting for a Man, and of a young ripe Girl about to be pluck'd. And these I related in their own Voices, naturally, as if they were authentick Histories. (89).
Although parody and satire are not the same thing (parody is a textual, or rather, intertextual practice, whereas satire exceeds the limits of textuality and literature, pointing towards social, political, religious or other human matters) these nevertheless often work together, as is the case with Ackroyd's Chatterton. He parodies various discourses and styles of writing, but he also uses parody as a means of achieving satiric purposes: "Lee, Lee, twig from the City tree, which does not grow but springs unnaturally, its roots in consanguinity, its fruit mere fantasy" (191). The fictional Chatterton ridicules the dead Alderman Lee with a mock poem, a parody of poetic language, which serves to undermine the dignity of the deceased person. This is an instance of parodic satire, and it is inconceivable without the one supporting the other.
Ackroyd's other characters use parody, even if with less sophisticated methods.Harriet Scrope, for example, parodies the speech of her secretary, Mary Wilson:
'That silly bitch typed them out -' and here she imitated her previous assistant's high quavering voice - 'it seemed to her, actually, that she didn't know what to do with them, as it were.' (C: 99).
Similarly, Edward imitates the vendor's "sound of high-pitched singing or wailing" (44) in the antique shop, and so exposes the ridiculous qualities in Mr Leno's behaviour. Charles says, "Don't...It's rude to imitate people" (44), precisely because of the critical elements in parody. Yet he himself does it, too, as he imitates Andrew Flint's "rather sonorous rhythms": "Oh, very fashionable. Very contemporary. Shall I say picturesque?" (19).
These examples are not without humour, but their real significance is that they display the deconstructive propensities of parody, its tendency to point out faults or imperfections, and so foreground Ackroyd's own critical purposes: Chatterton as a whole satirizes and parodies various social and literary institutions, such as art circles and their pretentiousness, publishers and the whimsical tastes of the reading public, even the church and its clichés in clerical language (e.g. 179). Also the hypocrisy of Chatterton's contemporaries is exposed, but above all, Ackroyd uses parody in order to mock the authority of History; it is his main weapon in undermining its credibility.
For just as Chatterton is a book about intertextuality, it is at the same time a parody of history writing - just as First Light is largely a parody of archeology and science. Chatterton is closely involved with history, but instead of being a historical novel, it is a novel about the historicity of history, the problems involved in history writing. Linda Hutcheon (in O'Donnell, P. & Davis, R., 1989: 3-28) calls such a type of novel "historiographic metafiction" and argues that novels like this have become increasingly numerous during the last thirty years or so, reflecting the crisis of scientific status in the human sciences, brought about by postmodernism and deconstruction theory. Besides Ackroyd, other novelists dealing with the same issues of history include Salman Rushdie, D. M. Thomas, John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Umberto Eco, as well as John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Ishmael Reed, and many others (ibid: 6). Peter Ackroyd is certainly in a good company, but it needs to be seen now how he has ended up there: in what ways he, too, uses and abuses history?
As already mentioned, Ackroyd seeks to deconstruct the 'truth' of history primarily by the means of parody. The official version of Chatterton's life is given on the first page of the novel, but throughout the book Ackroyd deviates from the biographical account and provides multiple versions of the same events which mock the authenticity of the historical record. The biographical 'truth' is that Chatterton was apparently discouraged by the poor reception of his poetry in London and killed himself with arsenic at the age of 17 on 24 August 1770. Ackroyd, however, offers two alternative versions, with a parodic twist: the first is that Chatterton only faked his suicide and lived on until at least 50, composing verses of his contemporaries, such as we now know as poems by Cowper and Gray, for example. The second is that Chatterton did die at seventeen, but not of suicide: instead of being unhappy, he was full of vitality; he did not do badly at all, but was prolific and optimistic; and instead of a suicide, his death was a pure accident, merely a wrong mixture of arsenic and opium, intended to cure a venereal disease. Both versions deride the official historical record and so raise questions about its validity: Ackroyd's suggestions about Chatterton's life remain a possibility - outwardly anyone could still interpret his feigned death and his accidental death as a suicide - but they remain a kind of possibility that would hardly be accepted by the conventions of history writing. Thus Chatterton's parody is clearly deconstructive: history is exposed as no better than fiction, merely one story among many others, and the belief in ultimate truths crumbles to pieces, which reflects the postmodern disbelief in Grand Narratives.
The second version, the story of the accidental poisoning, is actually doubly parodic. In addition to the biographical record, it mocks Henry Wallis' 'realistic' painting about Chatterton's death. Throughout the discussions between the painter and his model, Wallis insists on verisimilitude and realism, scattering pieces of paper on the floor, dressing Meredith in an 18th-century costume, and drawing the outlines of the picture in the attic room where Chatterton, according to his biographies, was found dead. But against such realist claims, Ackroyd makes us see that Wallis' painting, in fact, has very little to do with realism; its 'verisimilitude' is a greatly romanticized, beautified vision that has actually more to do with 19th-century art conventions than an outcome of arsenic poisoning:
The saliva fills Chatterton's mouth, a river overflowing its precious banks. There is a pain in his belly like the colic but burning so, my liver and spleen might roast in the heat. What is happening to me? He tries to rise from his bed, but the agony throws him down again and he rolls in terror to stare at the wall. Oh God the arsenic. He vomits over the bed, and in that same spasm the shit runs across his thin buttocks - how hot it is - and trickles down his thighs, the smell of it mixing with the rank odour of the sweat pouring out of his body. Everything is fleeing from me. I am the house on fire. Oh god the poison. I am being melted down. (227).
Ackroyd mocks Wallis' realism with a realism of his own, demonstrating that death by arsenic is never a beautiful sight. Yet the irony of Wallis' painting is that posterity will eventually remember the picture as "the true death of Chatterton" (157).
As Hutcheon (1989: 96) points out, the novel's multiple versions of the same events, such as Chatterton's death, draw our attention to representations of history, and so have a de-naturalizing effect, making us realise that history is always a made up, actively constructed creation. So Henry Wallis' painting is one representation of history, and Ackroyd's parodic reply to it is another - both telling a different story. Sarah Tilt's study of the images of death in English painting serves to emphasize the same thing, the multiplicity of representations, just as Charles finds out that
each biography described a quite different poet: even the simplest observation by one was contradicted by another, so that nothing seemed certain. He felt that he knew the biographers well, but he still understood very little about Chatterton. At first Charles had been annoyed by these discrepancies but then he was exhilarated by them: for it meant that anything became possible. If there were no truths, everything was true. (C: 127).
The truth of the past is the representation of events (Cousins, M. in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Attridge, D. et al., 1987: 133), but if these representations vary, then the truth becomes blurred.Or then "truth" as a word suffers from inflation, it loses its value, as is the case in Chatterton: the words "true" and "truth", "real" and "reality", are used so often, so differently, by different characters that 'truth' becomes a relative concept, always open to suspicion. Not only do the biographies portray different 'truths' about the poet (C: 127), but also Charles Wychwood thinks he has found the 'truth' about Chatterton (23). Mr Joynson tells the story of the 'real' bookseller, Samuel Joynson (219), and as we have seen, Wallis' painting becomes the "true death of Chatterton" (157). Harriet Scrope, moreover, represents the idea of hiding the past, keeping the 'truth' repressed or at least beautified for various personal or ideological reasons, as she wants to omit her plagiarisms from her memoirs. Eventually she does not even want to find the final truth about Chatterton but ponders that "there is a charm and even a beauty in unfinished work...Why should historical research not also remain incomplete, existing as a possibility and not fading into knowledge?" (213).
It is thus the scientific aspirations of history that Ackroyd constantly questions through his parody and his thematics of history writing. This is a typically poststructuralist position, a view taken by Rodolphe Gasché (in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History: 150), for example, who argues that
Poetic discourse and history are clearly aesthetic discourses. (...) History is one form of perfected sensate, or aesthetic discourse. It is one form of lucid exposition contributing to the perfection and clarity of confused representations. Yet, in that quality, history is poetic. It thus seems that history, rather than being a discourse different in nature from poetic discourse, is after all only one of the latter's possible articulations.
In many languages the word 'history' means 'story' and 'history' at the same time. The French use the word l'histoire, and the Italians la storia, but in English the two-fold etymology of the word has become blurred, and 'history' is given a special status, different from that of mere 'story'. Yet Ackroyd in a way bridges the gap between 'story' and 'history' and brings them closer together by devaluing the status of history and praising the fictionality of stories. His novel shows that the two terms ultimately amount to the same thing: Harriet says, "Everything is made up" (C: 28) and Charles makes the same observation: "The real world is just a succession of interpretations. Everything which is written down immediately becomes a kind of fiction." (40). Even Meredith approaches the same subject, but from another angle:
There is nothing more real than words. They are reality. (...) Our dead poet created the monk Rowley out of thin air, and yet he has more life in him than any medieval priest who actually existed. The invention is always more real. (...) The poet does not merely recreate or describe the world. He actually creates it. (157).
So Ackroyd in fact reverses the hierarchy: for him true fiction is more real than 'reality' or historical 'truth'. If history and fiction, indeed, are both aesthetic discourses, then are not they also valued and even believed in on aesthetic grounds? At least this is how Charles Wychwood and Philip Slack respond to the invented Chatterton manuscripts:
'Is it real?'
'Of course it is real. It's stupenduosly real. Incredibly real.' Charles paused. 'Didn't it seem real to you?'
'Yes, it seemed real.' (93).
On the one hand Ackroyd is flattering himself here - the fictional story of the Chatterton manuscripts is written by him, after all - but on the other hand he is being merely consistent with his view of fiction and reality, invention and history: later on Charles turns the story of these manuscripts into a historical investigation, and Harriet remarks, "None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves." (226).
Harriet speaks from her own experiences - and failure - of writing down the past. She knows that history is never objective; it is always subjective interpretation, invested with different ideologies, purposes and meanings (cf. Selden and Widdowson, 1993: 162-3). There is no such thing as an innocent history, Ackroyd seems to say: history can only be known as traces, elusive memories or impartial documents, primary and secondary sources, to which the historian imposes his or her meaning. One is not just dealing with 'facts'; these facts must be selected, ordered, sequenced and interpreted. The vast, and often conflicting, material has no meaning or coherence in itself; it is the historian who creates this structure or meaning. It is therefore a fantasy that "the past may not only be represented as history, but also exhaustively and truthfully represented" (Cousins, M. in Attridge, D. et al., ed., 1987: 135). As Ackroyd's Meredith paraphrases this poststructuralist notion of history,
'Of course there is a reality -'
'Ah! The tune has changed!'
'- But, I was going to add, it is not one that can be depicted. There are no words to stamp the infinite thing.' (C: 133).
This failure of history as a science is reflected in the failure of historical, scientific or forensic investigation in Ackroyd's novels: not only do Harriet Scrope, Charles Wychwood or Sarah Tilt fail in their work in Chatterton, but also in Hawksmoor, First Light and even in Dan Leno the ultimate 'truth' is strangely elusive: The detective Nicholas Hawksmoor becomes mad as a result of being unable to solve the connection he sees with murders taking place in London, but which seem to point towards the past, the early 18th century. In First Light the archeologists and astronomers "see what [they] want to see" (158) - "everything takes the shape we expect" (160) - as they gaze at the stars or build their somewhat far-fetched theories of the mysterious burial grounds of the ancient Britons. In Dan Leno the police do manage to track down and hang the murderer - but not for the right crimes, which for them remain an unsolved puzzle. In The House of Doctor Dee, moreover, the main character, Matthew Palmer, gains knowledge of the past by unconventional means: besides historical research he is in contact with the spirits of the dead through dreams, hallucinations, voices, apparitions, ghosts, and other nightmares, which eventually take him over in the three different endings of the novel.
Qualities like these, the resistance to closure and the failure of finding the 'truth', are typical characteristics of postmodern writing. Similar examples can be found in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1983) or Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot (1984), for instance, which both - like Ackroyd - are concerned with semiotics, the interpretation of signs, and its fallibility in the face of the world, which is more complicated than the human mind. John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is also close to Ackroyd's novels, with its parody of history writing and its two alternative endings, which mock the totality of any final 'truth'. Chatterton, of course, displays exactly the same features as these novels, and at the end of it we are left with the question: who really was Thomas Chatterton? What was the personality behind his poems, and why did he die? With his parody and with his problematizing of the biographical 'truth', Ackroyd interferes and tampers with the historical record.Yet his novel hardly becomes too serious and certainly not academically dry, but throughout retains its playful characteristics while posing its alternative scenarios and intriguing possibilities. We shall never find the final truth about the 18th-century poet, but this is merely the way it should be. When history fails, we still have the comfort of fictions. "And, when his body is found the next morning, Chatterton is still smiling." (C: 234).
As we have seen, questioning the authority of History is typical of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Yet I would like to argue that in the case of Chatterton the deconstruction of history also has deeper purposes than merely to problematize it for its own sake, or undermine it in order to further the causes of postmodernism. That has already been done by at least a dozen novelists, as Hutcheon (1989) and Scholes (1979: 206-9) tell us.
Rather, Ackroyd's deconstruction is closely related to his thematics of intertextuality. As I see it, his undermining of the myth of Chatterton has a quite specific purpose: for the Romantics - Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and others - Chatterton was important chiefly because he suffered a romantic death. Ever since them, Thomas Chatterton, "Thou marvellous boy...Who perished in his pride" (C: 21), has been seen as a tragic figure, a kind of pioneer of the Romantics, who "lost his life in a heroic attempt to penetrate the dull crashness of the mid-eighteenth century" (The Rowley Poems, ed. Hare, M., 1911: xxxiv). Yet Ackroyd, with his problematizing of the 'truth' of Chatterton, specifically seeks to shake this Romantic notion of the poet. The multiple versions that he offers of Chatterton's life parodically subvert any romanticism associated with Chatterton's destiny: an image of a fifty-year-old recluse, forging the poems of others, or a scene of a drunken adolescent haphazardly trying to cure a venereal disease with alcohol, drugs and poison, can hardly sustain any Romantic dreams of the poet.
Instead, Ackroyd undermines the Romantic myth in order to show that the importance of the poet was not that he died a tragic death, or lived a heroic life; the real importance of Chatterton was in his poetry itself: as early as two hundred years ago, he understood the powers of pastiche - how history could be woken up to life through imitation and imagination, by a unique conflation of fact and fiction. As Ackroyd's Meredith puts it,
Chatterton did not create an individual simply [the monk Rowley]. He invented an entire period and made its imagination his own: no one had properly understood the medieval world until Chatterton summoned it into existence. (157).
Despite the Romantic sympathies for his destiny, Chatterton has usually been seen as "a very minor poet...some kind of forger" (121).But with critical comments as above, interspersed with his fiction, Ackroyd re-evaluates Chatterton's importance and playfully suggests that he may well have influenced later poets more than has been assumed. This is what Charles says to Andrew Flint, for example, "Think of them all around watching us, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge...Meredith. (...) And do you know what...They all got it from Chatterton" (77).
Charles' suggestion may be somewhat facetious, but it is, nevertheless, a clear praise of the poet on Ackroyd's part. Yet Philip Slack stumbles upon something more concrete, when he reads an advert of "a forthcoming publication of Thou Marvellous Boy: The Influence of Thomas Chatterton on the Writings of William Blake":
There have been many accounts of Thomas Chatterton's influence upon the Romantic poets, but Professor Brillo's study is the first to examine in detail the effect which Chatterton's 'Rowley' poems had upon the vocabulary and prosody of William Blake's epic verse. Professor Brillo also studies the devices by which Blake introduced the subliminal figure of Chatterton, the suicide, into his texts and discusses the influence of Chatterton's medievalism on Blake's own vision. As Professor Brillo states in his introduction, "This is the one subject which Blake scholars have seemed unwilling to address, for it assumes that Blake was influenced by the work of a forger and a plagiarist. But it would not be going too far to suggest that, without the work and influence of Thomas Chatterton, Blake's own poetry would have taken a wholly different form." (72).
If this was entirely fictional, it could well be read as a parody of academic writing, or as a typical Ackroydian joke, but it is more than that since in Blake (1995) Ackroyd does exactly the same as the fictional Professor Brillo, when he writes that "By 1767 Blake had already started reading the verses of Thomas Chatterton...and was so powerfully affected by their medieval vocabulary and cadence that he began to reproduce the same characteristics in his own verse" (Blake: 40);
Blake knew that Chatterton had divined a truth and acquired the authority of the past in a manner unavailable to the orthodox scholars and fashionable critics of the period. (...) Blake's own debt to Chatterton is extensive and profound; there are various references to his early writing...and Blake's youthful poetry is heavily influenced by the vocabulary and imagery of the 'Rowley' ballads. (Blake: 57).
As I have argued before, Ackroyd's novels are literary criticism in the form of fiction, and this seems to be very much the case with Chatterton, since in instances like these his fiction sounds exactly like his biographies.It is therefore possible to read Chatterton, as well as other novels by Ackroyd, as an extension of his critical practices, and so form an overall view of 'Ackroyd's canon'of the literary history. We already know from his biographies that poets like William Blake, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are valued high in his scale, but reading novels like The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Chatterton or English Music supplies us with a plethora of further critical suggestions: English Music as a whole, for example, pays respect to writers as varied as Thomas Malory, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll or Arthur Conan Doyle, and chapter 16 (written in the style of Blake) even gives an entire survey of the history of English poetry - from Beowulf to 19th century Decadence - praising poets like Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton and Blake, whereas the Age of Reason (Dryden and Pope), as well as the 'night school' - Young, Smart, Gray, Cowper and Collins - are played down by reason of their "weak vision" and "narrowed perception" (English Music: 349-59).
In the same critical vein, Ackroyd's Chatterton asks his friend for an opinion of Cowper and Gray, and Dan replies, "Curiosities. Both of them." (C: 215). It is also interesting to notice that the imaginative qualities of George Meredith are questioned as well: "Meredith tried to imagine himself in the position of Chatterton but he could not. He was George Meredith." (139).
Throughout Ackroyd's books, however, Thomas Chatterton is praised with laudatory comments. He is given a special place in Ackroyd's literary canon:
'The greatest plagiarist in history?'
'No...He was the greatest poet in history!' (94).
Ever since the late eighteenth century, poets have attached different meanings to Thomas Chatterton. For William Blake, Chatterton was important in reviving the medieval world and mythology (Blake: 40). For the Romantics, Chatterton became their pioneer and a tragic figure (The Rowley Poems: xxxiv). For Oscar Wilde, he was an object of identification as well because of his criminal propensities and his artistic power (Ellmann, 1987: 268). But now Peter Ackroyd, too, seems to have found a precursor of himself in the 18th-century poet. Like so many men of letters before him, he redefines the myth of Chatterton and makes him an emblem of his own writing. Like any great writer, Ackroyd destroys old myths and creates new ones, and by so doing creates a reality or a mythology of his own.