1.

Dialogism, intertextuality and metafiction: David Lodge and Ian McEwan

Atonement by Ian McEwan

She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show
separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were
equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it
was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple
truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these
different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a
story need have.
Briony watches from a window as her sister Cecilia and the housekeepers
Son, Robbie Turner, scuffle near a fountain on the grounds. Briony does not
know for certain what is happening, but she comes to a realization that will
change her forever and influence all her writing from that moment on. She
suddenly knows that three different people with three entirely different realities
are witnessing this scene.The problem of other minds ceases to be a simply
academic one when Briony happens to observe a sexually charged encounter
between her elder sister Cecilia and the housekeepers son, Robbie. Briony
growing up from a girl of the absolute self into one who could have a dialogue
with others., thats means a dialogism As a child, Briony considers the moral
worth of fiction as she imagines turning into a story an incident she has
witnessed unobserved.
For the mature Briony, this childhood moment represents the beginning of her
own career as a novelist because it is the first time she truly realizes that other
people do exist.. This story becomes the substance of the novel itself,
rewritten several times over a period of sixty years by the adult Briony.
With the help of a dictionary, Robbie had read five pages in a morning and then
given up and made do with the illustrations instead. It would not be her kind of book,
or anyones really, but she had handed it to him from the library steps and
somewhere on its leather surface were her fingerprints. This again intertextually

references the genre of detective novels, in which fingerprints often play an

important role. Robbies letter becomes a clue in Brionys own detective
work.
Also is used intertextuality and metafiction in its return to World War II, and
raises similar questions regarding the role of novelistic writing and subjective
memory in the rendering of any historical event. Robbie quotes Malvolio's
lines from Twelfth Night "'Nothing that can be can come between me
and the full prospect of my hopes'"

Changing places by David Lodge

All I'm saying is that there is a generation gap, and I think it revolves around this public/private
thing. Our generation -- we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. I'ts the great
tradition of realistic fiction, it's what novels are all about. the private life in the foreground, history a
distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is
dying, and us with it. No wonder I could never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric
State. It's an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids...are living a film, not a novel.

Lodges design will weave, initially through apparently clear-cut oppositions, but
gradually through difference- through-similarity and similarity-through-difference, a
comprehensive and panoramic culture-scape, as it were. There are a lot of series of
dichotomies like: characters Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Zapp at the very beginning
of the novel is the complete opposite of Swallow at the beginning of the novel. Unlike his
British conformist exchange, Zapp is self indulgent, which stems mostly from his
almighty status compared to Swallow s barrenness.They are absolute opposites not
only in professional success, but also in character.
Is another dichotomy between American and British life styles which differs and this
difference is well observable in the academic world represented with the exchange
scheme universities, Rummidge and Euphoria and with the exchange scheme
academics, Swallow and Zapp. Also, the opposite of the fragment, the age of the book
and the age of film. The role is to to exploit the fine comic effect of a whole series of
oppositions.

Small world by David Lodge

Lodge wanted a framework that would accommodate a large number of academics from
all over the world travelling to conferences everywhere. A metafictional mode following
the (wild) conventions of romance will give Lodge an excuse for exaggeration and
coincidence as well as a distinct structural framework.
2. Gender and beyond: Angela Carter and Fay Weldon

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him. I
caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face,
the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace
became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a
potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.
The next day, we were married.

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon

Bobbo wished to be far, far away, with Mary Fisher, to hear her bubbly laugh , hold
her pale hand and put her little fingers one by one into his mouth until her breathing
quickened and she wet her own lips with her pink, pink tongue .
Nicola kicked the cat, whose name was Mercy , out of the way , an d the cat went straight to
the grate and squatted , crapping its revenge , and Brenda wailed and pointed at Mercy ,
and Harness became over-excited and leapt up against Andy in semi-sexual assault, and
Ruth just stood there , a giantess, and did nothing, and Bobbo lost his temper.
'See how I have to live!' He shouted . 'It's always like this. My wife creates havoc and
destruction all round : she destroys everyone's happiness!'
'Why won' t you love me? ' wailed Ruth . 'How can one love,' shouted Bobbo , 'what is
essentially unlovable?
In The Bloody Chamber is about a young woman of artistic leanings swept up in
a grand love affair with gruesome results. It is comprehensible that the evident
meaning of it is what she feels, thinks and experiences in this new phase of her life.
The themes are the ones of apparent love, which suggests that the proceedings in
this passage are only superficial and the feelings will be disturbed later on.
In these fragments, both women are unhappy but is more accentuated the idea of
feminism in Weldons novel. Fay Weldon forces the reader to consider the pattern of
judgement used to categorize Ruth as immoral. Ruth abandons the roles assigned to
her: doting wife, patient mother and begins a transformative journey. She becomes a
She-Devil who creates havoc and destruction all around, and by abandoning the
roles she is expected to endure, and breaking all the rules she plots her revenge.
Ruth adopting the mythical role of a She Devil. She sheeds her womanliness like the
skin of a snake and, in the process, amputates her maternal love, her sexual
ambivalence, and her desire for reciprocal love. Ruth is physically transformed into
the image of Mary Fisher.
The theme of communication reflecting the fact that there is no contact between
the couples since there is no dialogue in this passage; So, in The Bloody Chamber,
Bobbo shows his lovelessness to Ruth and leaves her with their children to survive
all alone and holds her responsible for making his life full of chaotic. This makes Ruth
and Jaya realize their worth in the family as well as in society. They find that despite
adopting and accepting the patriarchal norms, they have gained nothing. This
accentuated the patriarchal idea. When she says "... I thought I must truly love him",
this implies the idea of the lack of knowledge she has got about her future husband,
hence the doubts. For example, the passage reads they were married but it does not
say where.
Female solidarity

Down Among the Women by Fay Weldon

Scarlet is in despair.
Theyll hate it in the pub, she claims.
Why? They say they want men. Pubs are full of men. Drunk, red-nosed, miserable
men in old creased trousers, married mostly. Impotent, crude, greasy-necked,
smelly, stupid men with swollen bellies you can hear the beer swilling in their
stomachs when they walk, did you know? Let alone when they try to copulate but
men, none the less. They say they want men. Men they shall have.
Wanda is irritated by her ladies. She has tried to indicate them that life without men
is possible, even desirable, for women past child-bearing age, and that in fact the
sum of human happiness and achievement would be increased by apartheid
between the sexes, but still they persis in longing for the company of men; reject
lesbianism as a solution to sexual frustration, curl their hair, put on lipstick, and try to
look younger than they are. Why? Because they can only seem to exist in
relationship with men. Wanda takes them to the pub to punish them and to be
disagreeable to her daughter.

Wise Children by Angela Carter

Sometimes, she said, I feel a little lonely in the world. Dont you ever feel a little
lonely, too, Dora? No father, no mother, no chick nor darling child. Dont you even want
something to cuddle?
No darling child. Which was the nub of it, as far as she was concerned, as well I knew,
nut no use crying over spilled milk, although that be not the appropriate metaphor in this
instance. Too late to do anything about it, now.
I must admit, sometimes, it gets everso lonely, especially when youre stuck up in your
room tapping away at that bloody word processor lost in the past while Im shut up in the
basement with old age.

I noticed that the female solidarity theme is very obvious in these novels
passages which describes Wandas frustration with her divorcee and Nora
solitude even if she has only her sister, Dora. Wanda is unhappy and this
unhappiness can only be because male sexuality, but I think it has nothing to
do with men. Wanda is desperate and she does not see any other way out of
her suffering. While in Wise Children is another type of solitude. Dora and her
twin Noras mother dies in childbirth. They were products of an affair, raised by
"chance" by an adopted grandmother named Grandma Chance. This seems appropriate
since it would have been hazardous to have been raised by their father, Melchior Hazard,
a famous Shakespearean actor who never acknowledges them as his own
daughters. The Weldons fragment describe the solitude and experience of
women in her relationship with the men which indicates that life without men is
possible, even desirable. It was always this battle between men and women

in which the man was considered far superior woman, in which the women had
a lot of resposabilities in society, in childcare and but woman only wanted to
gain the freedom of mind, speech and actions. How Weldon says : The only
way men have of fighting back against the natural superiority of women is by
becoming women themselves. And in Wise Children the passage
emphasized the solitude of the woman, the two women will be, each of them,
mother and father, and the babies will be wise children in a world in which they
will have learnt the beautiful is as beautiful does that you imagine and make
yourself, rather than you are, a father, mother, male or female child, an
authorial reader or an authorial daughter.

3. Historiographic metafiction and the problematic relationship between past

and present: Peter Ackroyd and Graham Swift

Waterland by Graham Swift

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither
memory nor history. But man let me offer you a definition is the story-telling
animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an
empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to
go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up. As long as theres a story,
its all right. Even in his last moments, its said, in the split second of a fatal fall or
when hes about to drown he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his
whole life.
And when he sits, with more leisure but no less terror, in the midst of catastrophe,
when he sits as Lewis can see himself sitting, for the sake of his children in his
fallout bunker; or when he only sits alone because his wife of over thirty years who
no longer know him, nor he her, has been taken away, and because his
schoolchildren, his children, who once- ever reminding him of the future came to
his history lessons, are no loner there, he tells, if only to himself, if only to an
audience he is forced to imagine, a story.
So let me tell you another. Let me tell you

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was
generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor
had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not

committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm.
He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they
were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye or the awkward gait with
which they moved through the world. And they inhabited small rooms to which
Hawksmoor would sometimes be called: rooms with a bed and a chair but nothing
besides, rooms where they shut the door and began talking out loud, rooms where
they sat all evening and waited for the night, rooms where they experienced blind
panic and then rage as they stared at their lives. And sometimes when he saw such
people Hawksmoor thought, this is what I will become, I will be like them because I
deserve to be like them, and only the smallest accident separates me from them
now.
Waterland is a history teacher defines man as the story-telling animal,
and indeed stories are a part of our lives from our early childhood days; the
constitute an indispensable component of all human cultures. Story telling is a
mechanism of narration of both fact and fiction. In the "Story Telling Animal,"
Crick is again addressing his history students. He tells them that the curiosity
of people is a distinctive feature of our humanity is buttressed by Crick's views
about story telling being the difference between humans and animals - only
animals live in the here and now . Appears the problem with the present and
past.
Also at Hawksmoor,

Hawksmoor the architect is renamed Dyer and shares

the narrative with a late twentieth-century police detective, called Hawksmoor,.
This mischievous play upon names and coincidences signposts the more
perplexing effect of the two characters and their respective periods, here and
now, blurring and interwining. Swift goes on to link human identity to the
'capacity to keep the narrative going and introduces the historicalmetafiction. Hawksmoor the detective does not appear until this chapter, the
two earlier contemporary chapters, two and four. The detective Hawksmoor,
after he interviewing Brian Wilson, a neurotic young man who accuses himself
of the murders, realizes that he belongs to the same class of desperately
lonely people. In the later narrative, Hawksmoor frets himself into a delirium
over a series of stranglings which takes place in the vicinity of the churches.
The later crimes duplicate those committed by Dyer, who has wished to
baptise his churches with the blood of young victims.

4. History, memory and small people in Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro

Last Orders by Graham Swift

He said he wouldn't hold me to it, I should choose my own life. Just because
he and Gramps, just because the name of Tucker. But at least I shouldn't

decide without knowing, and seeing, at least I shouldn't decide against out of
unfounded fears. So I said yes, like it was my test. So he showed me,
explaining, and I saw that there was, really, nothing to fear, nothing to be
afraid of. It even made you feel a little calmer, surer. I was fourteen years old,
the two of us together in the parlour. Three of us. So later I said, "Yes, all
right." Your life cut out for you, your chances altered. And then it was too late
to have any other foolish notions, like running away to sea.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push,
a slight stumble, an the faade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great
butlers are great by virtues of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit
it to te utmost; They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his
suit las my father was.

Vince analyses his past, invoke the history of his family in order to understand
who he is. Vince becomes a butcher like his father, praises the occupation as
dignifying and manly, but at the same time resents it, as his hidden wish was to
wear a different robe that of a doctor. Vic remembers how his father told him
that, before dismissing the job of an undertaker for foolish notions like running
away to sea, mermaids and monsters, he should first have a look at what it
presupposes. The fact remains that his fathers influence is decisive for what Vic
becomes. His later decision to join the navy during the second World War is
presented here as the alternative choice of "running away to sea" . Also in
Ishiguros novel, Steven has followed his fathers example, deserting his personal self,
fully identifying with his job as duty and vocation. A great and dignified butler, it turns
out, is a servant that only considers what is good for his master, neglecting personal
feelings, family commitments.

Characters try to compensate for loss of continuity by looking for their

ancestors. They seek for meaning in an analysis of their personality as their
parents children, based on biological resemblance or role-modeling.
Also, Stevens spends much of his time recalling his past emotional attitude to Miss
Kenton: It is something of a revelation that this memory from over thirty years ago should
have remained with Miss Kenton as it had done with me

The intricacies of the story/ stories of the past are told almost reluctalntly, while trying to
faithfully report on the present. The narrative voices cannot help conjuring up the past, it
turns out. In the emerging story everybody makes mistakes, everybody has grounds to
reproach themselves and somebody else for some wrong from the past, but there is

also gratitude for good times had and good turns done to one another at crucial
moments.

Angela Carter is still (despite aan early death in 1992, at the age of 52) one of
the British writers most actively involved in the reconsideration of authorship and
of traditional cultural codes and discourses, as one of the most prominent
authors of writely texts, to use Barthess phrae. Paradoxically, she is a very
strong figure, very much alive, of the age that Barthes blesses with another
famous phrase, of the death of the author. She is alo the most prominent
female author in Britain not to have received, or not having been short-listed for,
the prestigious Booker Prize, Probably as a result of a certain preavailing
masculinist bias in the critical circles of the age. In addition to being a very critical
reader of cultural myths, a heterosexual feminist and confirmed socialist, Angela
Carter was a dealer (she would have preferred the term to high sorceress or
benevolent witch queen)in a sophisticated literary entertainment.
Fay Weldon emerged as a significant writer at the time feminism was gaining
ground in the postwar years, more specifically in the late 1960s, and she had a
very special relationship with it, showing the various subject-positions she has
assumed both in her life as a woman and in her literary career. Her relationship
to purely feminist discourses is, howeer, problematic, many critics noting her
occasionally ambivalent attitudes, combining anger leeled at both men and
women.
Ian McEwan is one of the brilliant creatie writers having graduated from the by
now famous M.A run by Malcolm Brabury and Angela Carter at the University of
East Anglia, Norwich. McEwan graduated, published his first collection of stories,
made a big literary splash, never looked back. It is hard to say whether early,
sudden success delayed the young writers development. What can be said,
looking in retrospect now, is that McEwan, unlike some of his brilliant
contemporaries, has managed to avoid boring repetitions of a successful
formula, has avoided taking reckless risks with sudden, new directions in a
desperate quest for originality.
Graham Swifts literary career has already spanned a quarter of a century, since
the publication of hist first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner (1980). It came as the
natural continuation of the earlier formative years of a bright suburban boy, the
son of a civil servant. Graham Swift, those who have read Waterland and who
have been impressed by the authors through knowleddge of the Fens will be
surprised to find out, was born in 1949 in Catford, South London, attended a
good public school before he went to Cambridge, where he read English.
Kazuo Ishiguro has been seen both as an international writer and as a
postcolonial figure. Is he the eternal migrant, the displaced, the exile that
Laurence Chamlou find at the centre of his novels or is he different from his
major characters? One can say, considering his remarkable achievements so far,
that he is more English than the English, in spite of being born (1954) in a very

Japanese city, Nagasaki, to ery Japanese parents. Ishiguro will play subtle
games with language and with the constructedness, cultural and linguistic, of the
butler in The remains of the day, Stevens obviously beein seen as a typical
colonized subject. The drawer, if we are to need one for Ishiguros figure, is very
likely, postcolonial literature.
David Lodge
It is customary nowadays for established novelists to teach creative writing in
universities, a trend started after World War 2 in America. From 1969 untill 1987,
David Lodge combined fiction writing with an academic career during which he
taught literature and wrote literary criticis; he didnt teach creative writing. He did
have a way of teaching writing, though. His novels, like his criticism, explore the
nature, mechanisms and conventions of fiction in challenging and entertaining
ways. His work is marked by the influence of Bakhtins dialogic vision of the
language of fiction, by structuralist and poststructuralist views on literature,
meaning and the death or survival of the author as the authoritative originator of
meaning.
Peter Ackroyd
His name has been used in connection with current developments in British
fiction by such critics as Linda Hutcheon , Alison Lee, Brian Finney and Susana
Onega. In 1992, in what appears to be the first essay on Ackyor, Brian Finney
spoke about the novelist as one of the figures that can loosely be called
postmodernist, although not engaged in extreme experimentation. Finney goes
on to describe this new breed of British writers that he considers Ackroyd to
belong to. Peter is very close to his contemporary Graham Swift, he is trying to ,
recuperate the past, especially Londons past.

Key word
1. The carnivalesque- Angela Carters use of the fantastic is remarkable; her
fictional recipe also includes social and political compusions. In her fiction,
fantasies are interwoven everywhere with the controlling realities, and the
magic features of myth and faity-tale are made available in what has come to
be called the world of the carnavalesque. Carter has been played with the
carnavalesque, but she never indulged in for too long.
2. Magical realism- denotes a combination of the fantastic and the realistic,
specifically informed by a narrative tone of banal response to the fantastic
elements, treating them as equally real to those that are apparentlu more
realistic. Use of magical realism at Angela Carter, enable her to make
observations about society gender and the power of myth and she is
particularly skeptical about any construct that ha been naturalized without
question.
3. Patriarchy- the word which is reminiscent of the phrase patriarchal society
that had been used by Virginia Woolf in her essays on women authors,
became one of the fundamental concepts of feminism, one of the targets of
feminist critiques. Patriarchal communities discriminate against women and
privilege men by enforcing traditional gender roles that picture men as
rational, determined, strong, born to protect and dominate women.
4. Intertextuality- is one that emerged from semiotics through the poststructuralist theorist, Julia Kristea (1941-). She conceived of texts existing
along two overlapping axes; a horizontal axis which connects an author and
reader and a vertical axis connecting the text to other texts. In the context of
literary analysis, intertextuality does not just refer to the way a reader may
identify the influence of one writer on another, but also to a broader sense
that writers and their reader are themselves written by the networks of
culture, language, history and representation that have produced them.
5. Metafiction- a genre writing which is associated with postmodernism, coming
into focus from the 1970s onwards. In metafiction, the anxiety about
meditation is expressed in a number of ways, through principally it takes the
form of a self-conscious presentation of the novel, not (as in realism) a a
represented world which seems to us to be true but rather as a piece of
writing. Magic realism was initially a way of dealing with the nature of reality in
that part of South America.
6. Feminism is both an ideology and a political movement. As an ideology it is
complex, historically variable, an necessarily reticulated with contradictory
contemporary ideologies. Long before became an organized political
movement in the nineteenth century in most parts of the world, literature had
already inscribed many of the conditions of womens lives against which
feminism protests.

7. Detective fiction- ingenuity and complexity of plot, including the locked

room, the miracle problem, and the impossible crime; subtle and legitimate
misdirection of clues but always with complete fairness to the reader; and
often a stunning surprise solution.
8. Historiographic metafiction- Postmodernism genre having a special
relationship with representations and constructions of history. Brian McHale
sees postmodernist historical fiction violating the conventions of classic
historical fiction by visibly contradicting the public record of official history,
by flauting anachronisms, and by integrating history and the fantastic. The
author illustrates the convergence of the two meaning of revisionism in the
posmodernist strategy of apocryphal or alternative history
9. Dialogism- particular genre of the novel, one that featured multiple,
interactive voices, styles, and points of view ( also called a polyphony of valid
voices), none of which assumes any particular priority. Dialogism also
signifies that a text carries on a continual dialogue with other texts.
10. Hybridity of (sub)genres produced an interaction of two (or possibly
more) separate genres.
11. Postcolonialism- Postcolonial literature is the body of literary writings that
respond to the intellectual discourses of European colonization in Asia, Africa,
Middle East, the Pacific and elsewhere. Postcolonial literature addresses the
problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country and of a
nation, especially the political and cultural independence of formerly
subjugated colonial peoples; it also covers literary critiques of and about
postcolonial literature, the undertones of which carry, communicate, and
justify racialism and colonialism.