Forgery, Dis/possession, Ventriloquism in the Works of A.S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd

Abstract

Most studies of ventriloquism and intertextuality in contemporary fiction have chosen to lay emphasis on the playfulness and metafictional quality of parody and, as often as not, have stressed its absence of ideological agenda. This article takes an opposite stance and highlights the hidden agenda of intertextuality, its inherent link with such questions as the death of the author, the exhaustion of literature and of culture, or postmodernist impersonality. Focusing more specifically on the works of A.S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd, it shows how deeply ambiguous the logic of intertextuality may be. While literature seems irremediably condemned to experience creation as a form of aesthetic haunting, while it is caught up in an endless work of mourning and can only harp on its own depletion, it may alternatively be seen as retaining some paradoxical critical purchase on our contemporary condition. By exposing its own depletion, it also gestures to a possible ideological and poetic renewal. Fiction indeed recovers here some of its critical intent since it allows the reader to reflect on his/her own position in a culture of surfaces, echoes and mirror effects, but also explores the hidden logic of literary history.