| 520 |
|
|
|b The inventive energy of language and situation in Jack Maggs masks, but does not displace, the anxiety about the hazards of imaginative life, more specifically, about the role of narratives in understanding and conveying trauma. By turns comic, sad, and nightmarish, Jack Maggs follows its protagonist’s dramatic journey in search of a place he can call home; through the “mutually reflexive acts of narrative and memory” (Olney xiv), home is redefined as both a point of departure and a point of return. The trajectory of Maggs’s life intersects with that of novelist Tobias Oates another strong-willed figure whose “crooked business,” and the mind behind it, Carey investigates in an attempt to explain the birth of a book (Great Expectations) and the death of a character (Abel Magwitch). Doubtless, the novel offers no conventional portrait of the artist as a young man. Since the author makes no claim to a “real life” basis for represent- ation, Oates’s ortrait surprises, amuses, and provokes his readers. As a self-eflexive exercise in invention, Jack Maggs develops a great number of definitions for the writer: a storyteller, an archeologist of the mind, a mesmerist, magician, craftsman, and last, but not least, a “thief.” To be a writer, Carey implies, is to have one’s feet in both worlds—the public and the private, the actual and the imaginary, the material and the intellectual. Oates’s professional life in the marketplace shapes his daily creative labours, which in turn reflect his desire to simultaneously confront and escape life’s harsh realities. Oates is, like Maggs, a restless soul hungry for love, but ultimately incapable of committing himself with heart and soul to anyone. He therefore reserves little sympathy for Maggs,who interests him more as a case study, than as a human being who embodies the dual capacities of man for good and evil. Maggs’s “demons” originate not in the penal colonies, but in the very heart of the empire, which is London. Oates’s excursion into the depths of Maggs’s psyche leads him to proclaim “the horror” of the other, rather than the “saving illusion” of tolerance and compassion. The analysis offered has led the researcher to a tantalizing conclusion: in reprising the past with a difference, postmodernism has also reappraised it so as to make it a precedent. Carey as a late twentieth-century writer has seized on the legacy of a canonical author to legitimize the origins of postmodernism, but in doing so he has also succeeded—through cultural revisionism—in making that origin a source of his own originality. This technique allows us to see how postmodernism and the preceding “- isms” illuminate one another's forms, aesthetic strategies, cultural logics, or continued relevancies. From a broader perspective, the re-readings, revisions, and reevaluations take their place in the ongoing process of historicizins postmodernism.
|
