Strange Characters: Dialogic Selves and Cosmopolitanism in Carl Van Vechten's Peter Whiffle

Abstract

Carl Van Vechten's novel Peter Whiffle. His Life and Works (1922) is a work of ‘autobiografiction’, merging biography and autobiography, and drawing attention to the fictional elements of life writing. It problematizes authorship and posits selfhood as a dialogic, polyphonic construct, dependent on the strategies, content and structure of narrative. The article explores the complex intertextual presence of George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man in Van Vechten's novel: they both propose different aspects of a similar story of two friends with cosmopolitan and refined tastes, whose subjectivities are mediated by constant references to other literary characters, and who depend on one another's narratives to have access to their own selves, or at least to become authors of works of art about themselves. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's and Lucia Boldrini's studies on auto/biographical selves, and on Rebecca Walkowitz's and Homi Bhabha's theories of cosmopolitanism, the article argues that Peter Whiffle's emphasis on dialogic subjectivity questions the notion of authorship and creates a problematic, parodic form of cosmopolitanism. This type of cosmopolitanism does not contribute to any productive experiences of self-knowledge or of knowledge of the foreign ‘other’, but rather asks crucial questions on the very possibility of these experiences.