“A Convenient Ventriloquist’s Dummy”: The “Christopher Isherwood” Character in Christopher Isherwood

<p>The “Christopher Isherwood” character first appears in Lions and Shadows (1938), Christopher Isherwood’s lightly fictionalised autobiography. Its foreword claims that “Isherwood” is merely a “guinea-pig” and asks us to read Lions and Shadows “as a novel” (xv). In the foreword to Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the author distances himself from his namesake once again: “‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more” (np). This thesis examines Christopher Isherwood’s relationship with the “Christopher Isherwood” character in five texts: Lions and Shadows, Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet (1945), Down There on a Visit (1962), and Christopher and His Kind (1976). In doing so, I attempt to answer the question, ‘what happens when Christopher Isherwood gives his name to the narrator of his fiction?’ The second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin begins, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (1). The critical consensus is that this paragraph is indicative of a namesake narrator who acts as a detached observer, withholding judgment, existing only as a vessel through which the story can be told. I maintain, however, that as Isherwood and “Isherwood” have the same name, we are compelled to compare and contrast the two. Isherwood’s biographer, Peter Parker, claims that “Isherwood liked to imagine himself his own creation” (np). Through his construction of “Isherwood,” Isherwood creates a self – one that does not pre-exist his texts. Isherwood’s novels anticipate a new kind of autobiographical writing, transparent and aware in their fictionality, four decades before it is formally recognised as a genre; while contemporary writers all over the world are now publishing autofiction more than ever before, there was a writer, alone the English island in the 1930s who preceded them all. His name, and his character, is Christopher Isherwood.</p>

“A Convenient Ventriloquist’s Dummy”: The “Christopher Isherwood” Character in Christopher Isherwood

<p>The “Christopher Isherwood” character first appears in Lions and Shadows (1938), Christopher Isherwood’s lightly fictionalised autobiography. Its foreword claims that “Isherwood” is merely a “guinea-pig” and asks us to read Lions and Shadows “as a novel” (xv). In the foreword to Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the author distances himself from his namesake once again: “‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more” (np). This thesis examines Christopher Isherwood’s relationship with the “Christopher Isherwood” character in five texts: Lions and Shadows, Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet (1945), Down There on a Visit (1962), and Christopher and His Kind (1976). In doing so, I attempt to answer the question, ‘what happens when Christopher Isherwood gives his name to the narrator of his fiction?’ The second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin begins, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (1). The critical consensus is that this paragraph is indicative of a namesake narrator who acts as a detached observer, withholding judgment, existing only as a vessel through which the story can be told. I maintain, however, that as Isherwood and “Isherwood” have the same name, we are compelled to compare and contrast the two. Isherwood’s biographer, Peter Parker, claims that “Isherwood liked to imagine himself his own creation” (np). Through his construction of “Isherwood,” Isherwood creates a self – one that does not pre-exist his texts. Isherwood’s novels anticipate a new kind of autobiographical writing, transparent and aware in their fictionality, four decades before it is formally recognised as a genre; while contemporary writers all over the world are now publishing autofiction more than ever before, there was a writer, alone the English island in the 1930s who preceded them all. His name, and his character, is Christopher Isherwood.</p>

Queer Performativity and Sexual Orientation in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man

This research examines the queer performativity and sexual orientation in a novel entitled A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. The main purpose of this study is to reveal the signs of homosexuality by the protagonist George. The queer studies analytical perspective is used to analyze how the writer constructs the sexual desire of the main character through several events. The study aims to scrutiny the queer performativity and sexual orientation of the main character as a flexible and indeterminate entity exactly in accordance with Butler’s theory, besides, the writer uses Sedgwick’s perspective that explains and describes sexual orientation and gender. The result of the analysis shows some symptoms that exist in George’s character. Living with a different sexual orientation as homosexual is not an easy job when the surrounding is heterosexual society. The situation can create a confusion and over self-identity also an existence of life anxiety. This exhibits negative behavior towards homosexuals and excludes them from autonomous carrying out their identity and essence. This research can give the readers a deeper understanding of what the queer process idea in the field of literature or in the workplace, hence, this also can be a new idea for future readers who are interested in discussing homosexual or gay men’s psychology.

Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice'

This is the first book-length study of Forster’s posthumously published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and revised over almost 50 years, Maurice became a defining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yet the critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ of Forster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aesthetic contexts for this novel. This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-century debates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory. Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors and contemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’s friendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants of Forster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions. They consider the volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequent generations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, Alan Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory, and twenty-first-century online fanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.

The Master and the Pupil

This chapter draws on Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in an exploration of Forster’s most significant and productive inter-generational relationships of the 1930s, arguing that these queer alliances shaped – and were shaped by – not only the Maurice manuscript, but an emerging queer culture that embraced the homosexual’s ‘slantwise’ position in society. As a young queer writer struggling to reconcile the demands of his personal and professional lives, seeking a mentor and yet fundamentally dissatisfied with interwar paradigms of leadership, Christopher Isherwood found in Forster not just a friend, but a master – a model of homosexual writerly life. The master-pupil dynamics that would characterise the pair’s relationship for the remainder of their lives fused the personal with the professional, establishing an ethics of equality and mutual exchange that would ultimately underpin both Forster’s novel, and the collaborative queer aesthetic that would, under Isherwood’s care, finally bring it to birth. Having established the peculiarly generative power of their relationship, the chapter repositions both men within a complex queer dynasty, calling on contemporary theory to offer an affirmative answer to the poignant questioning in Forster’s Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson: ‘is there nothing which will survive when all of you also have vanished?’