The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author! Postmodern Metanarrative and the Performance of the Author Function

Abstract

This research paper critically examines the meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.