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Article Excerpt
I want to cap my career with a masterpiece of some kind,
even a great very small one. I want to crown my end with applause, to go out on a note of triumph. Like an athlete dying young, but my race finally run. (Heller 229)
Made by Eugene Pota, the protagonist of Joseph Heller's posthumous novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000), the above statement projects the nagging desire for recognition that most artists share and the elusive dream of self-fulfillment that they all cherish. An elderly novelist desperately seeking a source of inspiration for a final masterpiece, one that would not replicate his earlier book, Pota emerges as Heller's own fictional persona, his "self-portrait." Just as Pota's reputation rests mainly on his first landmark novel, so Heller's is generally linked with Catch-22 (1961). In a 1998 interview with Charlie Reilley, Heller made clear that "[t]o write, I need a new idea, a complicated idea--not an imitation of something I've already done." (1)
Thus, the question that arises, for Heller and Pota alike, is how to escape tautology, how to avoid repeating what other texts (including their own) have said. Indeed, a strong sense of either "been-there-done-that" or "been-there-read-that" fuels Pota's writing anxiety, which is also increased by the inescapable recognition that the onset of old age presages "closing time" for him. (2) The source of this crisis lies, as Roland Barthes has famously argued, in the fact that the writer "can only imitate a gesture that is only anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them" (Image 146). It is this restlessness that Pota displays as, having reached a still point in his career and being faced yet again with the challenge of writing something "new," he is striving, against all odds, for imaginative autonomy. "Why must every new book be a completely different one?" asks Paul, one of Pota's editors. "It's how I am, I guess," Pota answers timidly. "It's the way we are" (228). The research that Pota does into the biographies of other writers yields the disturbing and "singular fact about the creation of fiction," namely that "it does turn more, not less difficult with seasoning and accomplishment" (20). Wavering between optimism and despair, he seems to resolve the crisis, this "stagnant, moribund paralysis" (21) in the very act of writing about it. (3)
In what follows, I examine Heller's notion and practice of authorship in Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man--a novel that joins the postmodern conversation at the intersection of intertextuality and metatextuality. These two postmodern trademarks converge in the recurring phrase "this book of ours," which invokes the fascinating, indeed obsessive, presence of other writers--models to be embraced but also challenged--at the same time that it suggests the reader's active implication in the creative process with the writer.
My project is threefold: first, I will seek to demonstrate how the author-protagonist of Portrait practices rewriting not to do away with authorship completely but rather to regain a humanistic sense of identity in a tragic moment of his life. Secondly, since Heller conceives of Pota's rewritings as self-conscious undertakings, I will turn to specific textual instances that fore-ground both authorial invention and intervention. Finally, I will probe the implications that biographical reading brings to bear on the crisis of authorship. Drawing on Frederic Regard's essay "The Ethics of Biographical Reading," which purports to reconcile the deconstructive and pragmatic approaches to the notion of authorship, (4) I will show how Portrait emphasizes the personal dynamics at work in the artists' creative endeavors, their essential humanity, which, Heller believes, is ultimately as valuable as their art.
The Writer and the Already Written
A great created work of art cannot be plagiaristic any more than it can be original. Its connection to the world ultimately depends upon its capacity to celebrate what already exists in ways that invent what does not yet exist. (Highwater 65)
In his study of "The Space of Intertextuality," Thais Morgan dwells on the interplay between the theories of inspiration and influence that constitutes the intertextual space. Whereas the first metaphor "promotes the individual author and innovation in relation to previous authors and the canon or tradition of texts" (240), the second posits a "unidirectional 'current' of relationship between an anterior text and posterior text," and places the "burden of debt entirely on the more recent text" (269, 240). From the psychoanalytic viewpoint put forth by Harold Bloom, influence calls for an "act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation" (30). This definition complicates the relationship between literary past and literary present, to the extent that a "strong" poet's emergence depends on his symbolic slaying of the literary fathers whom he admires yet struggles with, in an effort--most often doomed to failure--to both incorporate and transfigure their space of cultural authority.
Bloom's theory of influence and the anxieties attendant upon it are largely applicable to the aging novelist Pota, to one of his borrowed characters, the aspiring novice, Tom Sawyer, and by extension, to Heller himself. (5) In Portrait, Heller's autobiographical persona feels not only the "disheartening weight of all that spare time" (20) he does not know how to deal with, but also the enormous weight of tradition. Given that Pota finds himself unable to give individual expression to the texts of his precursors, it could be inferred that he is now facing the end of what T. S. Eliot calls the period of "full maturity," when "we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously" (4). Indeed, many passages in Portrait sound an alarming note as Pota is struggling to preserve the integrity of his vision and to add something meaningful to the already written. As for talent, Pota believes that it is "not so much the cause of anything that follows later in life," but rather "a blessed outlet for discontents that already exist--a blessed outlet, at least for a while" (170).
Pota's creative incentive is only partially assuaged through false starts (most of which Pota/Heller used in earlier novels), humorous variations on The Iliad and the Bible, re-workings of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, to name but a few of the explicit intertexts in the novel. Figures and actions borrowed from others' texts or from Heller's own tend to reappear in various guises pertaining to either classical mythology or pop culture. Pota wanders from one subject, scenario, or character to another, and spins off story after story, the ostensible ones involving the "sexual biography" of his wife and the "new" adventures of Tom Sawyer. Apart from revealing the terrible hurry and pressure under which he works, the helter-skelter quality of his life, this alternately constructive and deconstructive process accounts for the interplay of embedded narratives in which the conventions of realism gradually give way, or are abandoned, for those of anti-realism. (6)
To be sure, Pota's intertextual games constitute more than mere selfish diversions to fill the vacuum of his declining years. As David M. Craig notes, the author's "narrative task involves finding unforeseen routes to the same destination, to surprise his readers even as they say 'that again'" (17). The critic's statement concerns Heller's fiction in general, whose point of destination, Craig argues, is the "territory of human mortality." It is worthwhile observing that in Portrait, Heller ventures into this territory by two intertwining routes, namely, by making Pota's life coextensive with his writing and by dramatizing the crisis of authorship. The novel's general framework is established by its title, an obvious allusion to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as by its very opening chapter, which establishes a host of intertextual resonances that connect Pota not only with Joyce's semi-autobiographical persona, the introverted Stephen Dedalus, but also with the outgoing protagonist of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Heller's choice of these characters is not arbitrary, for, significantly, the main thrust of Joyce's and Twain's narratives is the coming of age of two characters (artist-figures) of quick intelligence and vivid imagination engaged in anxious self-fashioning. Both are "young and willful and wild-hearted," but unlike Stephen, Tom is not, nor does he want to be, "alone" (Portrait 171). If Tom's "romantic soul is titillated by the bittersweet thought of his own death," it is because he wants to be able to stage his own "resurrection," upon which he will be hailed as a hero and achieve "dazzling notoriety" (125). While Stephen's rejection of family, religion, and native land alienate him from his fellow human beings, Tom's battles...
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