Abstract
Chapter 6 summarises Burgess’s slow evolution from Dionysian to Apollonian novelist, seeking to explain this slow change in his fiction through the prevalence of authorial avatars and metafictional components in his oeuvre. It concludes that Burgess was a key figure on the cusp of Modernism and Postmodernism in the twentieth century, and explores the idea that his greatest fictional creation was the figure of Anthony Burgess himself, who has continued a posthumous fictional existence in the writings of other leading authors.
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- 1.
The Public Personage as Protagonist in the Novels of Anthony Burgess, Anthony Levings, doctoral thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury, 2007.
- 2.
Fiction autobiographique et biographies imaginaires dans l’œuvre d’Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), Aude Haffen, Thèse de doctorat, Paris III—Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010; Anthony Burgess, Autobiographer, ed. Graham Woodroffe, Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 2006.
- 3.
De Vitis, pp. 12–17.
- 4.
“Biographical Perspectives on Anthony Burgess (from Geoffrey Aggeler , Kingsley Amis , Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Roger Lewis and David Lodge ”, Anthony Levings, in Anthony Burgess, Autobiographer, ed. Graham Woodroffe, Presses de l’Université d’Angers, Angers, 2006, p. 60.
- 5.
Burgess’s debt here may be equally weighted between modernism and postmodernism as this format derives from both Joyce’s use of catechism in the “Ithaca” section of Ulysses , and Donald Barthelme’s dialogue between Q and A in “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel ” (The New Yorker, October 12 1968.).
- 6.
Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction, Kim Worthington, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 20.
- 7.
Worthington, p. 152.
- 8.
The position that the act of self-conscious observation eternally divides the self, which observes from the self which is observed, rendering the observation something less than the self in entirety, is one shared by other poststructuralist critics, including Lacan and Benveniste .
- 9.
From A Dead Man in Deptford, Nothing Like The Sun, ABBA ABBA, The End of the World News , and Mozart and the Wolf Gang respectively.
- 10.
“The fictional afterlives of Anthony Burgess ”, parts two to six, Jim Clarke , http://www.anthonyburgess.org/?mediablog=burgesss-fictional-afterlives-part-two-burgess-in-france, and following. Accessed 10 December 2013.
- 11.
Burgess later reversed this in order to pen a further sequel, Enderby’s Dark Lady .
- 12.
“This recounted the last day in his [Enderby’s] life, which was not too dissimilar from the continuing days of my own … He, like me, is a visiting professor under threat from black students. Like me, he carries a swordstick … Like me, he is visited by a mad lady who threatens murder”. (YHYT , 285–286).
- 13.
Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby, Anthony Burgess , Hutchinson, London, 1984, p. 7.
- 14.
“Anthony Burgess and Melvyn Bragg, in conversation”, ICA Talks, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 23 March, 1984. Audio recording at http://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0101XX-0100V0 accessed 16 January 2014.
- 15.
The fictional Indiana town in which Enderby’s Dark Lady is set, based on Indianapolis, as he inadvertently revealed in the discussion with Melvyn Bragg cited above.
- 16.
“What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About it?”, Patricia Waugh, in Metafiction, ed. and intr. Mark Currie, Longman, London, 1995, p. 41.
- 17.
“British historiographic metafiction”, Susana Onega, in Metafiction, ed. and intr. Mark Currie, Longman, London, 1995, pp. 94–95.
- 18.
The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holmquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981.
- 19.
In such novels as Money and London Fields. This trend, termed ‘auto-bio-graphy’ by critic Brian McHale, can also be seen in the works of Salman Rushdie , Will Self and Adam Thirwell , who also wrote in the aftermath or under the influence of Burgess.
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Clarke, J. (2017). Conclusion. In: The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66411-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66411-8_6
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