The Metafictional Aspect of The Peppered Moth

Julijana Nadj examines the recent development of biographical writing and points to several characteristics of contemporary biographical writing which can also be applied to The Peppered Moth. Nadj concludes for instance that:

Auch für die Biographie, die als Subgenre der Historiographie aufgefasst wird und die per definitionem ein hybrides Genre ist, lassen sich in den letzten

Jahrzehnten meta-isierende [sic] Tendenzen feststellen. Mit dem Typus der fiktionalen Metabiographie hat sie eine neue Erscheinungsform hervorgebracht, die die Ebene der biographischen (Re)Konstruktion in den Vordergrund stellt. Nicht die Darstellung eines vergangenen Lebens, sondern die Probleme des Biographen bei der Suche, der `quest`, bilden den Fokus metabiographischer Romane. (Nadj, 211)

Usually, the biographer, who is on the quest to (re)construct a life, is the main protagonist of the fictional metabiography. In novels like Penelope Lively’s According to Mark (1984) or A.S.

Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale⁵¹ (2000), the fictional biographers and other characters of the novel often discuss and examine biography as a genre. While trying to come to terms not only with their subject but with the composing of biography, the fictional biographers ponder questions of fact and fiction in biographical and historical writing and understand that they can never fully grasp the whole identity of a human being. They come to consider life a construct, or, as Nadj explains: “Der postmodernen Theorie von der ‘Auflösung des Subjekts’ kommt daher besondere Bedeutung für fiktionale Metabiographien zu. […] In fiktionalen Metabiographien gelingt es dem (fiktiven) Biographen nicht, seine Biographie tatsächlich zu einem Ende zu bringen, d.h. es gelingt ihm nicht, ein kohärentes und stimmiges Bild eines Menschen zu erzeugen“ (Nadj, 221). In The Peppered Moth this same conclusion is discernible. Yet, none of the central characters is a biographer who voices these thoughts but it is indeed the author herself who is the biographer on a quest. It is the afterword which turns The Peppered Moth from a novel with slightly biographic background to a fictional metabiography. In the afterword Drabble indeed lays open the structure of biographical writing by pointing to and commenting on the processes of selection and construction.

In the afterword to The Peppered Moth Drabble confesses not only her problems with finding an appropriate narrative form to tell her mother’s story but also admits her failure in doing so. She thus highlights her own quest to capture a complete picture of her mother and voices her doubts that it is possible at all to really reconstruct a life. Considering this, Margaret Drabble agrees with Nadj who resolves that

51 In this context it is interesting to note how similar a set of mind the sisters A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble have as their novels frequently share motifs and topics. Byatt, too, has used moths and other insects as metaphors (e.g. in Angels and Insects, 1993) and in The Biographer’s Tale, just like in Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet, the metaphor of the mosaic plays a prominent role. Both writers use mosaic-making in variations throughout their novels – as an image of the structure of the text itself as well as an image of the fragmented structure of life and (female) identity.

Metabiographien betonen die Tatsache, dass Biographien narrative strukturierte und subjektive retrospektive Konstrukte sind. Die

‘Unüberbrückbarkeit’ (Nünning 2000:30) zwischen dem tatsächlich gelebten Leben und seiner literarischen Aufarbeitung ist ein wichtiges Thema metabiographischer Texte” (Nadj, 213) and ”im Laufe dieser Suche [wird]

anerkannt, dass es einen solchen ‚ultimativen‘, ‚letzten‘ Sinn (im Sinne einer letzten ‚Wahrheit‘) über einen Menschen nicht geben kann. (ibid., 214)

The inclusion of the afterword points to the metafictionality of this novel and underlines an awareness of the text as construct. The author considers and plays with different literary genres (fiction and non-fiction) and tries to get to the bottom of all the possibilities the medium text offers. In her analysis of metafiction as self-conscious fiction, Patricia Waugh notes that “in providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (Waugh, 20).

This metafictional aspect of The Peppered Moth is further stressed by a narrator who at times interrupts the text and its illusion of reality when setting out:

If this story were merely a fiction, it would be possible to fill in these gaps with plausible incidents, but the narrator here has to admit to considerable difficulty, indeed to failure. I have tried – I apologize for that intrusive authorial ‘I’, which I have done my best to avoid – I have tried to understand why Joe and Bessie married, and I have tried to invent a plausible dialogue for them that might explain it. (PM, 129)

The narrator can certainly be identified as a metafictional tool when we consider Nünning‘s explanation: “Metafiktional sind selbstreflexive Aussagen und Elemente einer Erzählung, die nicht auf Inhaltliches als scheinbare Wirklichkeit zielen, sondern den Rezipienten Textualität und >Fiktionalität< – im Sinne von >Künstlichkeit, Gemachtheit< oder >Erfundenheit< – und damit zusammenhängende Phänomene zu Bewusstsein bringen“ (Nünning 2001, 429). There is indeed a focus on form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination to be found in metafictional writing which can be expressed with the help of an intrusive narrator.

Introducing a narrator who provides comments and causes disruptions sheds light on the process of fiction-making just as well as revealing the text’s self-reflexive awareness.

Since Margaret Drabble has already in her earlier novels habitually deployed comparable narrators who try to reach out to the reader and tell of their loss of omniscience, Olga Kenyon asked her in an interview if she deliberately uses this 19^th-century

literary device to build a bridge between herself and the great writers she admires.⁵² Though Drabble certainly acknowledges her literary predecessors, she denies this and explains:

It’s now called post-modernism […]. A lot of novelists do it today; John Fowles, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge.⁵³ What we are doing is assuming that the

Drabble thus uses this literary instrument to uncover the fictionality, self-reflexivity, and constructedness of her novels. Annegret Maack links metafictionality and this sort of narrator not only to postmodernism but specifically to fictional biography. In her essay “Das Leben der toten Dichter: Fiktive Biographien“ she resolves that

[d]ie Romane bekommen poetologischen Charakter, da sie literaturtheoretische Fragen nach der Funktion des Künstlers und dem Verhältnis von Wirklichkeit und Literatur thematisieren. Sie stellen historische Charaktere in den Mittelpunkt und demonstrieren gleichzeitig die Unmöglichkeit realistischer Darstellung. Im Rückgriff auf Historie und mit Mitteln des postmodernen Romans, etwa des Palimpsests, der Duplizierung des Schreibaktes, der Betonung der Reflexivität, des Einbezugs von Intertexten und der Adresse an den Leser konstruieren sie auf neue Weise biographische Romane. (Maack 1993b, 171)

But not only the narrator of The Peppered Moth admits her lack of knowledge but indeed so does the author herself by questioning the conditions of reality and fiction in biographical writing. By openly acknowledging this lack of omniscience, the narrator breaks and at the same time examines the barriers dividing fact and fiction. Directly addressing the reader,

52 In this context, a line can be drawn between Drabble and Maria Edgeworth, whose Castle Rackrent (1800) is not only considered to be one of the first historical novels but also the first novel to use an unreliable, observing, and disrupting narrator. Margaret Drabble has thus put into practice what she did when editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature, too, and deliberately put an emphasis on the connection between women writing then and women writing now. In her Englische Literaturgeschichte. Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlchterforschung (1997) Ina Schabert calls attention to this bond as well when referring to Virginia Woolf who exclaims in A Room of One’s Own that “[w]e think back through our mothers if we are women”. And Schabert goes on by stating that there are “spezifische weibliche Traditionslinien […], in denen schreibende Frauen über die Generationen hinweg miteinander in Verbindung stünden“ (Schabert 1997, 10).

53 Considering that there are female writers using the same device (comp. my previous footnote), it is striking that Drabble here places herself in a tradition of popular male writers. This seems to suggest that she not only tries to avoid being judged by her gender solely but also that she intends to distance herself from what might be regarded a rather female continuous flow of narration and instead turns to a male experimental and disruptive style of narration.

Drabble’s narrator – who is not, as we have to be aware, the author herself – declares his/her ignorance and hence questions in a rather postmodernist manner the conditions of reality and fiction. Through her narrator, Drabble thus stresses the fact-fiction-dichotomy to be noticed not only in The Peppered Moth but in almost any biographical writing. She is intent on making obvious that biography depends on the one writing it and that it is consequently open to interpretation, individual opinion, and partial commentaries. As a metabiographical novel, The Peppered Moth not only includes theoretical discussion on the problems of writing biography but also suggests a strong connection of the generic conventions of biography and fiction.