The Paratextual Construction of Anita Brookner: Chronotopic Conflict in the Book Review and Author Interview

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Notes

1. Patrice Higonnet, ‘Artists of indefinite longing’, The Times Literary Supplement, 3 November 2000, p. 16. On Anita Brookner, Romanticism and Its Discontents, London: Penguin, 2000.

2. Barbara Hardy, ‘A Cinderella's loneliness’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 1984, p. 1019. On Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac, London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.

3. Jan Zita Grover, ‘Small Expectations: Anita Brookner's Novels’, The Women's Review of Books, 11:10, 11 July 1994, p. 39.

4. Tony Bennett, ‘Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts’, in James L. Machow and Philip Goldstein (eds), Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 69.

5. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Genette defines the paratext as ‘those liminal devices and conventions, both within the book (peritext) and outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the reader’ (xviii). He states that, ‘[m]ore than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is rather a threshold … an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside … a zone between text and off-text … empirically made up of a heterogeneous group of practices and discourses’ (p. 2).

6. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in James D. Faubion (ed.), trans. Robert Hurley and others, Aesthetics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume II, Great Britain: Penguin, 2000, p. 222.

7. The canonical example is Jameson's exhortation: ‘Always historicise!’ Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 9.

8. Lynn Veach Sadler, Anita Brookner, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990; John Skinner, The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992; Inger Jorkblom, The Plane of Uncreatedness: A Phenomenological Study of Anita Brookner's Late Fiction, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in English, 93, English publication: Almquiest & Wiksell, 2001; Cheryl Malcolm Alexander, Understanding Anita Brookner, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; Eileen Williams-Wanquet, Art and Life in the Novels of Anita Brookner: Reading for Life, Subversive Re-writing to Live, Bern: Peter Lang, 2004.

9. ‘At 30 years old, Kitty is living the life of a spinster twice her age: except for the fact that she lives in contemporary London, she might well have stepped out of a Barbara Pym novel’, states Michiko Kakutani in her review of Brookner's second novel, Providence (1981). Michiko Kakutani, ‘Books of the Times’, The New York Times, 1 February 1984.

10. ‘Although the novel seems contemporary, it must be set in the 1960s’, notes Mary Kaiser of Undue Influence (1999). Mary Kaiser, ‘Undue Influence’, World Literature Today, Summer 2000, 74: 3, p. 592.

11. Anita Brookner, quoted in ‘The Art of Fiction XCVIII: Anita Brookner’, interview by Shusha Guppy, The Paris Review 29, Fall 1987, p. 165–6.

12. Anita Brookner, quoted in ‘The Secret Sharer’, interview by Shusha Guppy, World and I, 13 July 1998, p. 282.

13. Anita Brookner, quoted in Williams-Wanquet, n2, p. 80.

14. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 84. Without wanting to deny the vast theoretical discussion on the chronotope, the length of this paper limits my discussion here. I primarily use the term in reference to the device which establishes the temporal and spatial context of a text.

15. Bakhtin, M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 84. Without wanting to deny the vast theoretical discussion on the chronotope, the length of this paper limits my discussion here. I primarily use the term in reference to the device which establishes the temporal and spatial context of a text.

16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Creation of a Prosaics, California: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 429.

17. Anita Brookner, Undue Influence, London: Viking, 1999. Hereafter cited as UI.

18. Genette, p. 5.

19. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, metonym, and the typology of modern literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 25.

20. Wendy Steiner, ‘She Who Won't Be Obeyed’, New York Times Book Review, 23 January 2000, p. 34.

21. Patricia Craig, ‘On not being overwhelmed’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 August 1986, p. 932.

22. Mona Knapp, ‘Incidents in the Rue Laugier’, World Literature Today, 71: 1, Winter 1997, p. 151.

23. When Brookner was asked by Robert McCrum, ‘Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English literature?’ she replied, ‘I don't know anything like that. I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.’ Anita Brookner, quoted in ‘Just don't mention Jane Austen’, interview by Robert McCrum, The Observer, 28 January 2001, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfictionstory/0,6000,429694,00.html.

24. Richard Vidaud, ‘The Palimpsestuous Writing of Anita Brookner: From transtextuality to autotextuality’, trans. Sally Marks, Etudes britanniques contemporaines, 19 December 2000, p. 81.

25. Skinner, pp. 22–51.

26. I use Laurent Jenny's differentiation between explicit and implicit forms of intertextuality. Laurent Jenny, ‘The Strategy of Form’, in Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), trans. R. Carter, French Literary Theory Today, Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 34.

27. In Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000) Brookner comments that The Painter of Modern Life was ‘undoubtedly Baudelaire's most memorable utterance on the business of creative imagination … in which painting is hardly mentioned at all. This is nominally a report on the work of Constantin Guys, referred to throughout as MG.’ Brookner, Romanticism, p. 73.

28. Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, London and NY: Verso, 1988, p. 119.

29. John Frow, Genre, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 12.

30. Cheryl Malcolm Alexander, ‘Anita Brookner’, in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.) A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000, London: Blackwell, 2005.

31. Alexander, p. 479.

32. Brookner's novels ‘have received scant attention outside of book reviews, where they have generally been either applauded or tolerated—according to the reviewer's taste’. Deborah Bowen, ‘Preserving Appearances: Photography and the Postmodern Realism of Anita Brookner’, Mosaic, Winnipeg, 28: 2, June 1995, p. 124.

33. ‘If Brookner's great narrative strategy depends, literally and figuratively, on the paradigm of exile, then the corollary to that strategy is what Michiko Kakutani, in a review of Brookner's most recent novel, Latecomers (New York Times, 24 February 1989: C31) has called the “schematic juxtaposition of opposites”.’ Robert E. Hosmer, ‘Anita Brookner’, in Robert E. Hosmer (ed.), Contemporary British Women Writers: Texts and Strategies, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, p. 33.

34. Morris, p. 11.

35. Stephan Porombka, ‘Eclectic Reading: Apology of the Intellectual Treatment of Literary Criticism’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 15: 1, 2005, p. 116.

36. Stephan Porombka, ‘Eclectic Reading: Apology of the Intellectual Treatment of Literary Criticism’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 15: 1, 2005, p. 117.

37. Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, London: Sterling, 2000, p. 6.

38. ‘Brookner has devoured [Henry] James, and she drops what she has learned from him wholesale into her books. She is overly fond of mimicking his qualifying phrases.’ Deborah Friedell, ‘Disengagement’, The New Republic, 9 February 2004, p. 32.

39. In this case we hear about ‘the author's almost total identification with her heroines’. Michiko Kakutani, ‘Books of the Times’, New York Times, 1 February 1984, p. 32.

40. ‘Last June, when the British edition of this book [The Next Big Thing] was published, the London Review of Books’ assessment began as follows: “Anita Brookner's first novel appeared in 1981. Since then she has published it again, slightly altered, almost every year” … such are the perils of prolific authors; reviewers eventually weary of them. And Brookner stands guilty of being astonishingly productive.’ Paul Gray, ‘Understated Outrage at Growing Old’, The New Leader, November/December 2002, p. 44.

41. Morris, p. 116.

42. Morris, p. 115.

43. Morris, p. 113.

44. Heather Mallick, ‘Depressive tale lacks substance’, Toronto Sun, 6 September 1998, http://www.canoe.ca/JamBooksReviews/sep6_brookner.html.

45. Morris, p. 114.

46. Morris, p. 119.

47. Morris, p. 118.

48. Morris, p. 115.

49. Julia Kristeva, Julia Kristeva Interviews, Ross Mitchell Guberman (ed.), NY: Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 195.

50. Elizabeth Judd, ‘Making Things Better’, The Atlantic Monthly, 291: 3, April 2003, p. 109.

51. Genette, p. 40.

52. This analysis is influenced by Judith Butler's canonical interpretation of the mechanism of gender signification and performativity in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge, 1990, p. 136.

53. Moran, p. 15.

54. Moran, p. 24.

55. Miranda Seymour, ‘Mistress of gloom’, The Atlantic Monthly, June 2001, p. 107.

56. Lisa Allardice, ‘The Bay of Angels’, New Statesman, 15 October 2001, p. 56.

57. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Private View’, New Statesman & Society, 308: 7, 24 June 1994, p. 40.

58. Donna Seaman, ‘Altered States’, Booklist, 93: 5, 1 November 1996, p. 459.

59. Peter Seital, ‘Theorising Genres—Interpreting Works’, New Literary History, 34: 2, p. 239.

60. Morris, p. 115.

61. Morris, p. 116.

62. Morris, p. 117.

63. Morris, p. 117.

64. Genette, p. 362.

65. Skinner, p. 169.

66. Authorless review, ‘The Debut’, Publishers Weekly, 30 January 1981, p. 64.

67. Sue McGregor, interview with Anita Brookner, Woman's Hour, BBC Radio Four, London: National Sound Archive, 13 January 1982.

68. Anita Brookner, quoted in Woman's Hour, interview by Sue McGregor, BBC Radio Four, London: National Sound Archive, 13 January 1982.

69. Anita Brookner, quoted in, Novelists in Interview, interview by John Haffenden, London: Metheun, 1985, p. 65.

70. David Galef, ‘You Aren't What You Eat: Anita Brookner's dilemma’, Journal of Popular Culture 28, Winter 1999, p. 3.

71. Skinner, p. 172.

72. Skinner, p. 172.

73. Olga Kenyon, in Olga Kenyon (ed.), Women Writers Talk: Interviews with Ten Women Writers, Oxford: Lennard, 1989.

74. Sheila Hale, ‘Self reflection: Anita Brookner's Heroines’, Saturday Review, 11 May/June 1985, pp. 35–8.

75. Skinner, p. 175. See Richard Mayne, radio interview with Anita Brookner, Kaleidoscope, London: BBC Script Library, 18 October 1984.

76. Kenyon, p. 5.

77. Williams-Wanquet, p. 10.

78. Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression, London: Sage, 1991, p. 22.

79. Moran, p. 63.