Dickens is Dead, Long Live Dickens: Influence and Imitation in Referential Fiction
Zadie Smith | The Fraud | 464 pages | Penguin Press | 2023
Martin Riker | The Guest Lecture | 256 pages | Grove Press | 2023
Nicole Flattery | Nothing Special | 240 pages | Bloomsbury Publishing |2023
Lisa Robertson | The Baudelaire Fractal | 160 pages | Coach House Books | 2020
I recently saw The Wife of Willesden, the first play by the novelist Zadie Smith. As I walked through the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I noticed the stage had been transformed into a bar. Some members of the audience even seemed to be seated there to fill the suggested room. How did I miss this chance to participate? I wondered as I took my seat in the balcony.
I should have noticed the people sitting at those low round wooden tables had been facing out all along. The cast, from the bar staff to the titular wife, Alvita, were positioned to mesh with the audience, their seats inches from the front row. This comfortable aura of a night out was carried by traditional English monologue—as one would expect from an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s story “The Wife of Bath”—though this also swerved and broke the fourth wall to score easy laughs off the early Renaissance writer. Jokes about Chaucer and his milieu’s myopia were padded as minor characters turn and nod to the crowd like friends in the know. Smith, too, was roasted a bit, appearing in effigy as a character called Author (complete with her trademark head wrap) who apologizes not for a lack of imagination in Smith’s earlier novels, but an excess.
Smith seemed to be building toward an electric synthesis, braiding the work and the views of its two authors together. I was only somewhat wrong at the beginning—the people seated on stage were clearly not audience members—but we were indeed being asked to play an active role in The Wife of Willesden.
Wasn’t this Chaucer’s aim, too? Alison, the narrator of “The Wife of Bath” is a charismatic repeat-wife—since age twelve she’s been married five times—demonstrative of a double standard: men could have as many partners as they liked throughout their lives without facing the backlash that Alison has faced. She tells of how Queen Guinevere stayed the execution of one of King Arthur’s knights, a rapist, for one year and one day, on the condition that the accused return in that time and correctly explain what women desire most in life. With the help of a secretly hot witch to whose dom he willingly subs, he finds the answer: freedom, autonomy, respect, sovereignty—whatever guys get that gives them charge over households and their own lives. Alison’s commentary raises the pitch of the story from parable to polemic aimed at fourteenth-century England.
Around the midpoint of The Wife of Willesden, however, Smith’s focus shifts from this dialogical aspect of “The Wife of Bath” toward the existence of “The Wife of Bath” as a text, an historical artifact to be studied. The play offers more commentary than drama. Perhaps Smith just picked her spots: as Alison becomes Alvita and a snippet of English mythology becomes Jamaican, she demonstrates the portability of Chaucer’s feminist folklore, decolonizing the narrative in a manner so straightforward it is as though she used the keyboard shortcut for “find and replace.” Still, by the end I felt I’d overheard Smith debating a colleague at a cocktail party, and not, as advertised, translating the Canterbury Tales for modern times.
Instead of addressing the public as Chaucer did, Smith addresses Chaucer himself (or the body of work through which a part of him endures) for reasons that are likely as literary as they are political.
In politics, candidates’ claims of lineage are suspect; the lines that have been drawn from Reagan to Trump and Roosevelt to Biden say more about the perceived cultural memories of the electorate than any actual continuity in policy or philosophy. It’s there, at the voting blocks, that Smith looks closest. Chaucer is her predecessor in that he spoke to her public (the English-reading public) first.
The Wife of Willesden is the ultimate example of explicit literary influence: it could not exist without “The Wife of Bath.” This runs deeper than a marketing gambit (which Smith wouldn’t need anyway). A “radical for the sake of tradition” as Vulture critic Andrea Long Chu has it, Smith has assigned herself the sacred duty of preserving the dignity of the greats. In 2023, she wrote in The New York Review of Books:
I’m the one severely triggered by statements like “Chaucer is misogynistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.” Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else.
Smith takes the tone of a scholar seeking truth to appeal to objectivity, which, in the case of Chaucer and Woolf, is an unreachable ideal: we will never have complete knowledge of what, if anything, they intended to accomplish with their work, nevermind who they were, what they believed, what it was like to know them. Here the air of intellectual maturity is a self-deception that results from conflating her sense of what she finds interesting with a generational attitude. She stresses the complexity of the individual at a moment when moral and cultural relativism is having something of a revival, a trend she criticizes in her review of the film Tár (2022), where the quote above appears. No matter how artfully described, Smith’s sense of wonder at the ambiguity of human existence is no replacement for a more direct exploration of her relationship with her generation, nevermind her influences. We are creatures of reference, engaged in private dialogue with the countless dead, blursed to imitate in small ways and in large our own personal Jesus. Smith likely fell in love with Chaucer before learning about his initial attitudes toward women; this is why she focuses her energy on the progress he’s made in “The Wife of Bath.” Yet her chosen mode is as bound up with assessing Chaucer as it is reinventing herself. Every word has twin meanings. Tradition is both her model and subject.
Even after her third novel, On Beauty, based on Howards End by E.M. Forster, was published, Smith was trying to find a place for herself in between lyrical realism and the avant-garde. In The New York Review of Books, she warned that if the former was to survive, “lyrical realists will have to push a little harder at their subject.” Smith takes her own advice in her new novel The Fraud, which surpasses The Wife of Willesden in ambition and execution. Her experimental spirit may be intact, but she’s channeling it to play a sophisticated imitation game.
The Fraud is a big social novel in Charles Dickens’ style that literally bears the weight of English literature: in the first pages a carpenter is called to stop the library floor from caving in. Set in the 1870s, The Fraud mostly takes place down the street from Dickens’ property in London, at the home of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. Our guide is Eliza Touchet, the real cousin of Ainsworth’s late wife who still keeps his house. Three frauds reveal themselves: there’s Eliza, who feels undeserving of the stability working for William provides her, and William himself, moping about his writing in the background. Then there’s Roger Tichborne, a butcher from Australia who believes he’s owed a baronetcy by rights and becomes the focal point of a prolonged courtroom spectacle that seems to plunge all England into deep doubt about foundational notions of inheritance and legacy, identity and truth.
Smith teased The Fraud in The New Yorker by claiming to have killed Dickens in its pages. Dickens is a “sometimes oppressive, sometimes irresistible, sometimes delightful, sometimes overcontrolling influence, just as he was in life. Just as he has always been in my life,” she writes. No use in pretending otherwise. The larger gesture, though, is similar to the one Smith makes in The Wife of Willesden, as she replaces—expands, really—Dickens’ provincial stage for the world stage. Long Chu writes, “Her two paths for the novel have become a perfect circle: What could be more avant-garde in an age of data harvesting and identity politics than a heartfelt 19th-century novel?” Smith reanimates Dickens, Forster, and Chaucer to foreground the perspectives of their choruses, renovating the canon on its original plot.
The Fraud and The Wife of Willesden mark a new period in Smith’s writing. Not quite historical fiction, which tries to transport the reader back to a particular time and place, her recent books form inextricable connections to the work of others, encouraging the reader to find points of similarity and departure. Less a form than a style, not a genre but a method, this is referential fiction: enthusiastically derivative, a monument of ink. Through various devices it wraps one text around another like a Tootsie pop, the chocolate taffy and hard candy never mixing but nevertheless consumed together.
Smith is not the first to write referential fiction but she has gotten closest to articulating its aims. Consider these three other recent novels: Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture, which shows the risk of getting in bed with your idol; Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, a troubled attempt at setting boundaries; and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, which erodes the historiographical impulse altogether and in so doing offers thoroughly unique pleasures that are well worth the effort of absorbing two writers at once.
They’re all first novels. Each also concerns the destructive relationship between a famous man of art and letters and a young woman. Obsession palpitates throughout, the kind that drives you to steal a diary. Because of this, Wikipedic trivia abounds. Lines of dialogue are cribbed from the archive. Out of their desire for subject mastery, acknowledgments, too, are onerously detailed, often followed by end notes on works cited and images referenced. At times the authors seem to want to write both fiction and history—to produce a novel that can be read at leisure that is also a document which can be studied for a factual accounting of a person’s life and work. While this impulse rises out of an archive fetish, its expression reveals a deep anxiety about the originality and impact of one’s writing.
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The Guest Lecture is an academic’s night terror. Abby, a budding economist, has been denied tenure. She’d written a surprisingly popular book that her committee thought redundant of the (real) University of Illinois economist Dierdre McCloskey, despite Abby not knowing who McCloskey was at the time of writing. With her teaching contract set to expire at the end of the year, it seems Abby will be leaving academia for good. In what she did not expect to be her final act as a professional scholar, she has agreed to give a talk on the work of John Maynard Keynes. It’s the night before this talk, in a hotel room “somewhere in middle America,” where we meet her, wide awake in the bed where she will remain throughout the novel, lying beside her husband, Ed, and their daughter, Ali. Since she cannot sleep, she might as well run through tomorrow’s remarks using the loci method Ed had recommended to her, by which she associates portions of the speech with the rooms of their house. She imagines walking through her front door when she hears a voice. “Abigail,” says Keynes, “welcome home.”
This is a delightfully precise set-up for a novel that takes place within one character’s imagination; even the furniture in the house is an illusion, the windows let in eternal light. Abby recites her speech to Keynes, who interjects, asking why she needs to cover his failures; correcting her; semi-erroneously claiming to have predicted the Second World War; and trying to keep her on task. But she knows she hasn’t been possessed. “[As] you know perfectly well,” Keynes says, “I am just your imagination. Anything I ask, you are asking yourself.” By locking his narrator in place, Riker gives himself immense freedom. Characters and settings, memories and ideas come and go with the speed and temerity of manic thought, morphing in unusual and surprising ways. At one point Abby’s commentary on Keynes’ 1931 Essays on Persuasion gets blended together with her nostalgia for early motherhood:
Maybe the value of memories, as with any other commodity, is a function of scarcity... When you first notice that you have some, you have relatively few, so they seem to matter more...Finally, there are so many memories, and you are so used to having them around, so accustomed to their plentitude, that your demand curve approaches zero, and your past, your entire personal history, seems hardly worth the effort of remembering at all.
Abby is quite proud of herself for producing an economic theory of why young and old people are similarly self-absorbed. Perhaps mercy disappears Keynes at this moment. I was waiting for his savage peer review to stunt my impulse to pick at Abby’s proposition, but it never comes.
Why? The first three of the Essays on Persuasion, written in 1919, warn against burdening war-broke Germany with debts it could not repay. Abby tells us as much earlier when flattering dream-Keynes, but she emphasizes the basic fact of how much money was in the bank. However interesting the products of Keynes’ abacus may be—did you know that, before WWI, the combined value of toys and fertilizer exported from Germany was just £3 million?—Riker misses the real rhetorical strength of the Essays, which lies in their focus on the human cost of excessive retaliation, even that exacted for a righteous cause. Keynes opposed British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s demand for German reparations that Keynes believed would exceed “all sense of number and magnitude in matters of finance,” punish generations of innocents for the crimes of their parents, and effectively condemn a nation to permanent destitution. “In the great events of man's history, in the unwinding of the complex fates of nations,” Keynes writes in the Essays, “Justice is not so simple.” Especially not if you suppose that “the effort of remembering” is a lucid act of will and not a reflex of subconscious passion; that memories of playing with a wooden duck or firing a bayonet can be controlled, valued, and traded like the lumber from which those objects are carved, that our experiences of childhood or war are likely ever to depreciate to zero.
I look up from my worn undergraduate copy of the Essays and recall I am reviewing a novel. Maybe it’s unfair to measure Riker’s Keynes against the real thing. But what else, really, are we meant to do with this character? Abby ascribes her affinity for him and his creative mind to her deeper love of experimentation, which traces back to her own college days spent listening to alternative music and reveling in unconsummated crushes on other women. In this way Keynes may represent problems that demand serious concentration, like mastering economics and navigating the academic job market, and acts as a rubric. If Abby can learn everything about Keynes, she’ll have a stronger handle on all the other aspects of her life, from her scholarship to her sexuality and her family. Keynes could also represent Abby’s conscience. In one scene, he appears in the costume of a judge and tells Abby exactly why she’s imagined him that way:
“...Earlier you were thinking about Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows. They both have courtroom scenes.”
That’s true. I wonder why.
“Perhaps because courtrooms in reality are so adult and boring and horrible, the place where all the worst things end up. The messiness of life organized into categories and assigned consequences. Perhaps it's fear of messiness that leads adults to courtrooms in the first place. Perhaps it's fear of consequences that causes children to enjoy being silly about them in books. Do you suppose you are more like an adult or a child in this respect?”
I don't even know what I'm talking about.
That uncertainty ends the chapter. Together with Abby’s notion of self-absorption, this half-hearted regression theory tells us who Keynes is and what narrative purpose he serves.
Roughly half of The Guest Lecture is spent on Abby’s memories and anxieties; a quarter, we’ll say, is a reasonably interesting if introductory description of Keynes’ ideas; the remaining quarter, which contains the passage above, comes from a proto-Keynes. Written in the second person, that portion seems addressed to both Abby and the reader, offering tidy justifications for all her/our trouble rationalizing modern existence, ending all anxious spirals not assuaged by the repeated “Breathe, breathe” that perforates the text by returning our attention to the task at hand. Keynes’ tone in those passages reminds me of a talk therapy chatbot, with all the emotional depth one might expect from a well-meaning predictive tool with an information cut-off.
A sense of a conscience, a sense of a consciousness, Riker’s Keynes is a sense of a person, and as such he is not actually a character at all. Of course, as a figment of her imagination, the economist-on-her-shoulder has no independent thoughts or motivations. But this means he has no status, be it as man, spirit, or concept. Nothing Keynes tells Abby seems to have any real impact on her. And while on the surface we know why she worries—career, esteem, family—Abby can’t think deeply about these things alone. Keynes reappears before things get so adult and boring; rather than enrich each other, they cancel each other out.
The reader is then faced with a paradox: The more I learn about Keynes, the more I’m also meant to be learning about Abby. This leads me to read straightforward explanations of Keynes’ life and work as ciphers which can reveal what makes life meaningful to Abby. My interest has been split between them since the beginning; whenever too much time is spent with just one I begin to wonder where the other’s gone off to. On the other hand, I suppose The Guest Lecture could be read without a care for the real Keynes, though it would be a feat of concentrated avoidance. If I could forget Keynes, the novel would bank on its formal experimentation with a plot which never leaves bed, like Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Abby’s memory theater is an interesting place in which to wander. But even Abby thinks of Keynes as the talisman which gives her life meaning. To walk through that theater without him is to be lost.
Referential fiction is a reaction against that feeling of becoming unmoored. Riker understands the paradox of twinned interest but seems to believe whatever risk of divided attention that may result from it is worth the many payoffs of intertextual exchange. When an economic theory is explained and its force made to feel urgent by virtue of its transmission through a character, Riker seems to think, The Guest Lecture will have both taught me something and delighted me with a good story. The Guest Lecture rewards the Keynes reader and the curious newcomer alike, both of whom can read the works cited in full to aid understanding or, when time is short, use Wikipedia for the gist.
But is it always just the gist? Wikipedia is so ubiquitous in digital culture as to require special usage rules on college syllabi and yet judged either too unwieldy or inconsequential by academics and journalists as to exist with little scrutiny. From that absence of critical judgment follows a certain listlessness in fiction writers, especially those interested in history. Must I acknowledge all these wonderful details to demonstrate authority? Or would emphasizing the wrong point of trivia expose me as a dilettante?
Online, the word “great” refers to size. If I query Wikipedia for the greatest artists of the 20th century, its algorithm will pull the list of those most sought out by its users and most referenced on other artists’ pages. Andy Warhol is near the top, attracting 23.5 million views of his page from July 2015 to November 2023. That’s just behind Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo, with around 25 million each in the same period, but Warhol makes Salvador Dali (13.6 million) and Jackson Pollock (7.7 million) look like hobbyists.
By these standards, with around 5.7 million views, Keynes may as well have kept a diary.
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Two strains of wiki-catnip: mysteries and trivia. Nicole Flattery must have known she’d found a two-for-one when she discovered that Warhol, the cameo star of Nothing Special, had produced a forgotten novel from conversations with his former lover, the obscure actor Ondine. In her endnotes Flattery cites several biographies and critical texts, placing Gary Indiana’s Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World side by side with Warhol’s assailant Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto “for a different perspective” (which seems like an understatement). Yet none of the books she cites is the original source of the information that lays the groundwork for Nothing Special; that would be Viktor Bockris’s 1989 biography The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, the primary point of reference on the Wikipedia page for Warhol’s A, a novel. Bockris reports that two teenage girls were among a small group of transcriptionists hired to help Warhol produce clean transcripts from tape. Flattery’s book is a fictionalization of their experience at Warhol’s Factory, seen through the eyes of our narrator Mae.
This is not to discount Flattery’s invention, but I do now wonder where she found this story and, with such a diversified bibliography, I want to know with which strand of Warhol studies she feels most aligned. I thought the denouement of Nothing Special was especially inventive until I read it on the Wikipedia page and then in the Bockris. The story goes something like this: Bockris tells us that the mother of one of the transcriptionists was scandalized by what her daughter had been listening to—Ondine talks frankly about queer life, sex, and drugs—and she breaks one of the tapes, forever erasing hours of conversation. In Flattery’s telling, that’s just the cover story Mae wants her boss at the Factory to believe; Mae lies, saying her alcoholic mother smashed it in a blackout. Mae’s taking the fall for her friend, the other teen transcriptionist, who fled Factory life in humiliation after a botched modeling tryout to move in with a wealthy older man. That girl listened to the tape, which she says contained little more than street sounds, and destroyed it herself, “Because I wanted to break something...It’s better than spitting in [Warhol’s] face.”
In A, a novel, Ondine says “Darling, would you put the mike away here, I have a secret to tell you,” but when Warhol asks what the secret is, Ondine changes the subject. After reading dozens of pages of meandering talk, I found this frank plea quite touching. What would Ondine have said if he hadn’t been recorded? After spending so much time with books and films about Warhol, Flattery seems to have had the background to invent something plausible and compelling. She could have imagined Ondine’s secret, had him criticize Warhol’s lust for power (which elsewhere Flattery says is her real subject) or, well, anything at all. Instead, she gives us air brakes.
If Smith makes the ambitions of referential fiction clear, Riker and Flattery (whose books do have other attributes) show its pitfalls.
The first is the desire for completion. Keynes paralyzes The Guest Lecture’s Abby because total mastery of his life and work would make extreme demands on her emotional and professional circumstances, over which she has little control. This stunts the novel, too, setting an unreachable standard of expertise and the expectation for the kind of unique interpretations of Keynes’ work to which many economists devote their lives. Riker knows that the reader’s sense of Keynes is a lot like Abby’s, made up of stories about a man that have been passed down for decades. Rather than struggle with that characterization as a historical myth, Riker has Abby repeat it to demonstrate objectivity. This discounts the value of the myth of Keynes, which, for us and for Abby, is all that’s left.
By contrast, Andy Warhol’s full name appears just twice in Nothing Special. Flattery has tried to give a sense of what it was like to be on his periphery, subject of but never party to his lurking gaze. Part of why Nothing Special does not achieve this is a fault in the editing process; Flattery’s Irish English has gone unchanged in the American printing, such that at one point Mae, a Queens native, rides the “subway carriage” to tell her stepdad that she’s been dealing with non-specified “City problems like everyone else.” Herein lies the second danger. It’s hard enough for a writer to faithfully depict a city with which they aren’t intimately familiar. Great care indeed is needed to depict other places at other times, never mind other people.
Throughout our reading lives we encounter similar forms again and again. However faintly, we can often sense reverb. Technology makes it perhaps too easy to check sources and detect plagiarism. As if more reasons were needed, this situation has made writers even more self-conscious about their characters. Surely new characters can still be invented, but how to begin? Finding someone for whom few records remain, or who simply has yet to appear in a novel, may seem like the start of a new approach to fiction: the logic goes that under close enough inspection, every person is thoroughly unique and therefore every new story about them will be, too. Those who’ve ever tried autofiction or a writing prompt will recognize in this faux discovery the germ of the impatient desire for the novel that writes itself. But readers, too, should feel cheated by contemporary fiction that’s mapped out with formulae inherited not just from literature but cinema, and increasingly episodic, franchised forms of it. When we read genre fiction or stream a series, we hope its meaning will become clear—One more chapter/episode. It might get good!—but, denied this, we defer to an unintelligibly long chain of allusions—self-symmetrical plots, recurring themes, the marks of influence—rather than assess the thing before our eyes.
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In the tradition of La Fanfarlo, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Bell Jar, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Autobiography of Red, and Leaving the Atocha Station—each the first and for the most part the last novel by a poet—comes Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, the model for referential fiction done well.
Hazel Brown is a young poet who wakes up one day in the mid-1980s having somehow authored the entirety of Charles Baudelaire’s body of work (including his novella La Fanfarlo). If Hazel had carried on in North America, she probably would have exploited this for financial gain; if she’d remained in the UK, she may have been too ashamed to ever mention it. Being as we are in Paris (via London, via Vancouver), Hazel’s engagement with this gift is one of simple pleasure. She receives the “Baudelairean authorship” like unexpected airline miles, setting off across France to kiss beautiful boys near fountains, think about Baudelaire, and try on new garments in roughly equal measure.
But what makes The Baudelaire Fractal such a moving and effective work is not its tradition or Robertson’s sensuous, verse-inflected prose. Rather than kill, martyr, or spit in the face of Baudelaire, Hazel swallows him whole, imbibes the good and the bad in the myth of his biography to enlarge him not like a photograph on a billboard but like a swelling lung, alive. She takes the sexism evident in his journals as her mission, a fault that she herself, like a feminist gut bacterium, can dissolve:
Everything I was raised to be, all the docility instilled in me, the little punishments and constraints of girlhood, the intense violence and violations of adolescence, the roughly incised undying shame of female maturity and fungibility, everything about my past and my ordained place in the world which I tried to escape by constructing an autonomous world within the shoddy inadequate confines of my room, my diary, my knowledge, all these things continued to live in me in the form of grave spiritual contradiction. I say contradiction when what I mean is sickness. To write was to destroy something.
In the crosshairs: not Baudelaire-qua-Baudelaire, just the parts of him that failed to engender the sublime qualities of his poetry. Robertson gives us all the biography we need, including his ostracization from his family and ever-present destitution. We learn about his fraught romance with the French-Haitian dancer Jeanne Duval, the simultaneous passion and racism with which he treated her and fictionalized in La Fanfarlo. She offers the fatty morsels we gossips want, too, like the fact that Baudelaire used to drip musk oil into his thick red carpets before hosting parties at his apartment in the Hotel Pimodan. Though seldom quoted and never speaking as if as an apparition, Baudelaire, whom Hazel had barely read, emerges more vividly for being observed from a distance. It’s Hazel who we care to know well, the way she weeps for the “sexuality of sentences.” With the strength of her perceptions, she successfully imitates a master, laying his spirit—not a phantom but the idea of the man that has for so long blinkered her imagination—finally to rest.
An inverted definition of new knowledge: knowledge that emerges when one notion is destroyed for the sake of another. This gives the work of the intellect a moral charge. Given that the amount of data the brain can store is limited, maybe it is in the service of justice that we hold on to some ideas and not others. For Hazel, to read Baudelaire in London is to form one notion of him and to read him again in Paris is to form another, i.e., the right one. Similarly, when she wears the same beloved coat again and again she pays attention to different attributes, its softness, its warmth. At the height of her obsession, Hazel convinces herself that the coat had once belonged to Baudelaire himself. In the end she abandons it in a drab hotel wardrobe, and when she does I long for it to fall off its hook, for some mishap in its hanging to signal that the encounter must continue. But Robertson denies Hazel the comfort of a coat, whosever it may have been, to show how dissatisfied the girl has been by her attachment to anything and everything Baudelaire.
•
Shortly after Baudelaire died at 46 in the summer of 1867, his estranged mother arranged against his wishes for his body to be buried on the family plot in Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery. To avenge this, his fans would later construct a cenotaph—a marker for the dead whose remains lay elsewhere—in another plot on the land. Which of these is the real memorial?
Where is Baudelaire? Warhol? Keynes? Dickens?
The existential status of the departed is a question as old as death. We do not need to posit an afterlife to grant a form of endurance. Existence may precede essence, as Sartre had it, but since antiquity we have known that essence also succeeds existence. In the late-4th century, the pre-Socratic poet Simonides is said to have been reciting verse while walking through the rooms of a restaurant when the roof collapsed. Dismay soon overwhelmed the first responders as they found bodies crushed beyond recognition. Simonides alone survived. Grasping for a way to be useful, Simonides, standing in the rubble, realized he could just make out the floorplan. He retraced his steps and began reciting his poem. He found he could recall who sat where: so-and-so at the head of the table during the first stanza, what’s-her-name in the middle for the second. All the dead were thus identified, millennia before forensic science. This is the origin of the method of loci (the plural form of the Latin locus, or “place”), now widely used as an exercise for improving memory. Riker’s Abby uses it to get her lecture down pat. As she moves with Keynes through the rooms of what may soon be her former house, she both knows and doesn’t know that she is walking through ruin. She obsesses over destruction: the fading of some of Keynes’ best ideas from public consciousness, the likely insomnia-induced breakdown of her lecture, the certain end of her academic career, the disappearance of her young family’s home. Unlike Simonides, her aim is not to preserve but to remember clearly, once and for all, and to never again dwell on all that she sacrificed for her career, a career that ended before it began. Memory doesn’t work this way, but Abby makes us wish it did.
All fictions contain the essences of other fictions. The explicit nature of the reference is what makes it possible to see the various instincts that Riker and Flattery, Robertson and Smith have in common. Deep down they all reject the historiographical impulse. They want to deny the relationship between subject and object but at the same time demand a close reading so the reader might appreciate the full context within which their novels appear. This is as much a product of writers’ ability to instantly find records online as it is likely a misguided expectation that readers do the same. But like an aqueduct bringing reservoir water to a faraway city, the connection fills our fountains as it drains its source. These novels try to take apart and reconstruct history while retaining the solidity of the mythology that surrounds their respective heroes. Only Robertson and Smith can see this is folly. The Baudelaire Fractal should be celebrated as the first major success of contemporary referential fiction as I understand it. Robertson escapes the paradox of the twinned interest through sustained meditation on the central issue of originality that brought Hazel to Baudelaire in the first place. In exchange, she surrenders much of Hazel’s exterior world—we never even learn her lover’s name—and she convinces me that I didn’t need it anyway. Just one of Hazel’s qualities matters: the relational quality of her attraction to poetry, not just Baudelaire, but poetry.
The Fraud, meanwhile, is diffident; its form and content carry too much debt. Smith seems to leer at Dickens, both proud and terrified, uncertain what it means to have killed him. Long Chu writes that “The irony of Smith’s career is that she has never actually excelled at constructing the kind of sympathetic, all-too-human characters she advocates for...their studied ordinariness makes us long for Smith’s true strength, which lies not in character but in voice.” This may be an accurate assessment of Smith’s characters, but her voice is evident even in The Wife of Willesden. It isn’t her language or style that’s changed, but who she wants to hear it.
That night at BAM, when the play was through, I wondered if the intended audience wasn’t British or American viewers at all, but Chaucer himself. As a form of literary hagiography this was somewhat moving, though since obviously no peer-to-peer conversation could take place I couldn’t tell who was supposed to have learned what. While it is exciting to encounter a piece of art that draws from another, to feel meaning vibrate through time, I want that meaning to puncture surfaces. The result should surpass fan fiction. Smith warned lyrical realists to “push a little harder at their subject,” or else they would just be subsisting on a concave form. If referential fiction is to survive, its writers will have to push much harder still, applying sufficient pressure to both create and destroy.