배경진, "셰익스피어 전기의 포스트모던적 재구성: 앤소니 버제스의 [태양과는 전혀 다르지]"

Kyung Jin Bae, A Postmodern Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Love Life in Nothing Like the Sun

Abstract

As a postmodern historical novel, also known as historiographic metafiction,
as Linda Hutcheon terms it, Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess reflects
revisionist perspectives of postmodernism. With Deconstructionism and New
Historicism, there emerges a new perception that emphasizes a dynamic
relationship between the historical and the fictive. The fact that there is more
similarity between historical narrative and fictive narrative than the distinctions
between them casts doubts on the authentic and acknowledged historical
narratives. Historical metafiction is a fictional approach to history with a parodic
twist that uses and abuses the very historical concepts it challenges. Historical
metafiction tries to accomplish this by visibly contradicting the public record of
official history and by violating the constraints on classic historical novel.
This paper aims to examine the postmodern historicity and its
self-consciousness in Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess. This novel
confronts the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation and
normative/apocryphal history by creating a most unconventional image of a
great historical figure. This fictional biography offers a challenging
interpretation of the great poet, “Swan of Avon,” through creative imagination
and experimental narrative. Based upon Shakespeare’s love sonnets, this novel
portrays Shakespeare as a homosexual, desperately in love with a young
aristocrat. Shakespeare was also presented to be fatally in love with a “dark”
Indian lady, impotent in his relationship with his wife, and in the end dying of
syphilis. This reconstructed Shakespeare is rather an embodiment of human
anguishes and desires than a genius writer.
This novel also reveals its intense self-consciousness about the way in which
all this is done. First it plays upon the factual accounts of the life at issue in
order to trace fictional deviations from them and sometimes deliberately falsifies
them in order to foreground the plausible interpretation and potential
understanding of Shakespeare’s life. However, it also manifests a certain
introversion of a self-conscious turning toward the form of the act of writing
itself. From the beginning Burgess claims that this whole work is a mere lecture
to his students over wine. Even though the writer creates an imaginative version
of historical and real Shakespeare, the pleasure of reading this work comes from
a double awareness of both fictiveness and a basis in the real world. Inventive
as much as deconstructive, the result is beyond mere a fact or fiction. As a
result, this fictional Shakespeare contributes to an understanding of historical
Shakespeare in an ongoing attempt to get at the great writer.

Key Words

Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, historiographic metafiction, postmodern
historicity, self-consciousness, Shakespeare biography, Shakespeare Sonnets