The Existentialism of Feminist Extratextual Reality in Carol Maso’s The Art Lover

The postmodern text takes on the experimental challenge of confronting the lack of a center at the heart of language and dwelling in that void. Carol Maso accesses that void to confront issues of selfhood and authorship in her postmodern novel, The Art Lover (1990). Maso clearly understands that the conventional novel is predicated upon dominant ideologies of truth and identity, as well as on realism rather than existential reality. For her, it fails to represent truthfully the chaos of the world outside the authentic existential experience. She therefore consciously writes differently in order to tell some kind of truth about herself. Yet, as Dwight Eddins observes, by opting out of long-established literary conventions, postmodern authors like Maso are placed in a dilemma: “In humanizing this world, [s/]he lies; in trying not to lie [s/]he is threatened by incoherence and chaos” (205). Maso avoids the problem by fusing experimental writing with narrative conventions. Meanwhile, in her non-fictional writing, Maso asks, “What is a book and how might it be reimagined, opened up, transformed to accommodate all we've seen, … been hurt by … given … taken away?” In using the inclusive term, “we”, she recommends this experimental approach to other marginalized (oppressed or subjugated) authors. In the fiction itself, she indicates a means by which other marginalized female authors can emancipate themselves from the stultifying boundaries of fiction and the stereotypical identities /realities created for them by long-established literary convention. As an embodiment of this question about this project to re-imagine the book, The Art Lover, also invites marginalized readers to reread predetermined notions of a centered identity and accepted reality. Maso invites them to test her theories of the constructed nature of reality in their own lives. The multi-layered text of The Art Lover discusses both authorship and existential experience through the narratives of a fictional author, Caroline Chrysler, and that of the doubly fictional characters in the novel she is writing. Caroline distills something of her own fictional life into her fictional narrative both textually and through the insertion of a variety of intertexts in various media. But it is not just the fictional Caroline, who interpolates her life experience into the text of a novel. The real-world novelist, Carole Maso, does the same. Maso herself appears as a character in the fifth section of the novel, where she reveals that she is, in reality, dealing with the death of her best friend, Gary, who has died of AIDS. Arguably, Maso uses her novel – on a variety of levels - to carve out a space for herself where she can tell the “truth” of her lived experience as a woman and an author. Keywords: Existential Experience; Experimental Writing; Narrative Techniques; Embedded Narrative; and Marginalized Female Authors. DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/84-04 Publication date: December 31st 202

The Postmodern Multi-Layered Narrative of Existential Feminist Subjectivity: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Postmodern fiction demonstrates a suspicion about the narrative status of history. Arguably, its project is to reveal the illusion of truth in history because of history's reliance on texts. There is no doubt that historical events occur, but their transmutation into “fact” and their transmission to posterity are limited by their narrativization and textualization. In the Afterword to her novel, Alias Grace (1996) – a fictionalized narrative centering on a real-life person embroiled in a double murder in 1843 – Margaret Atwood reveals her interest in this problem with “history”. She tells the reader, “I have of course fictionalized historical events … as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history”. The purpose of this paper is thus to consider Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace as a postmodern fiction that seeks to reveal the illusion of truth in history through her use of innovatory narrative techniques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “double-voiced” is used to examine the permitted, surface-level utterances – and the necessarily conflicting actual narratives – of the two narrators in Atwood’s novel. However, the term is also applied in the broader feminist/theoretical context of the silencing of the female subject more generally. Atwood establishes a fragmented, multiplicity narrative. This arises from the reported and somewhat self-aware observations of the eponymous Grace and a doctor named Simon Jordan. Seemingly, the author’s own authority does not exist. Atwood thus exploits the slippery nature of language that does not have some kind of “truth” imposed upon it. The historical “truth” about Grace Marks is never revealed, not because Atwood is “leaving it to the reader's imagination” but because Atwood plays with the problem of personality as a social construction. Almost invisible as “author”, Atwood nevertheless reveals just how language can be manipulated and made to conform to a certain version of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood also recuperates the voice of a supposedly murderous woman by revising the myth of woman’s silence and subjugation. Because her speaking voices are required to practice “double-voicing” to be heard, through presenting the reader with both voices, Atwood recuperates the moments of existential liberation to be heard from emergent voices

A Post-Colonial Re-Reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

The imperial project started to influence English national identity as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and the English began to relate their national prominence to their colonial activities, whether in trade or in the acquisition of foreign territories, throughout the eighteenth century. However, England experienced its share of anxieties on the road to imperial "greatness" in its dealings with both other European powers and its native subjects. The British people's tendency to examine themselves and their international achievements with intense pride helped to neutralize those anxieties, much like Crusoe's imagined responses to possible dangers alleviate his fictional forebodings. The English ameliorated their concerns about their international position by becoming an ever more self-referential society, thinking more highly of themselves on account of their contact with colonized peoples, as is epitomized in the personality of Crusoe. To the fictional Crusoe, the experience of his relationship with Friday validates his self-worth and his native culture more than anything else. Robinson Crusoe's affirmation of colonial power through the assertion of his authority over a particular (othered) individual corresponds with, and epitomizes, England's trading and territorial empire during the eighteenth century and the consequent effects on British subjectivity, at a time when the British were struggling to set up a trading empire and challenging other European powers for territory and markets abroad. Robinson Crusoe successfully resolves the insecurities relating to Britain's colonial activities by asserting, through Crusoe's character, the superior nature of the English subject