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In what ways does postmodernist fiction draw attention to the figure of the author, and why does it do so? The title The Drivers Seat raises the question; who is in it? The postmodern aspects of this book suggest that there is more than one feasible candidate; the protagonist, the author, the reader, God One of the primary issues of postmodernist fiction is the question of authorship; the nature of fiction itself, not of the story. Much of postmodernist art inspires questions about its context rather than its content [Butler 2002: 1]; the dead shark in the tank required no brushstrokes, but is considered art because it is conscious of the fact that some may not consider it so. Were it displayed anywhere other than a gallery we might mistake it for something other than art. So we have to wonder, who is the author is relation to the narrator? Spark ran a risk when she wrote a novella in which she gives the reader only what happens, not why it happens. At first, it can be difficult to engage with, but after the phrase soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages [Spark 1974: 18], the suspicion is sown. In John Lanchesters introduction, he argues that the great flaw in Post-Modernism has always been that the writers freedom to expose the fictionality of fiction tends to be precisely paralleled by the readers freedom not to care what happens in the book [Spark 1974: vii]. Spark tackles this flaw by using a technique characterised by highlighting something abnormal, so as to draw attention to the lack of an absence [Spark 1974: 71] of the normal, which would otherwise fail to alarm us. The brutal normality of much of the novella is effect of Spark stress[ing] the realness of the real [Spark 1974: vii]. Spark self-consciously draws attention to something abstract (ergo, the figure of the author) by withholding any explicit references to a temporal drivers seat until the end. Spark has written what happens in a matter-of-fact way with the tone of a police report, so as to highlight the absence of why something happens. In Chapter Seven, Lise calls the book a whydunnit [Spark 1974: 101], not a whodunnit. Nothing is elaborated upon with due art [Spark 1974: 51]. We can only guess and entertain ideas of the motivation behind Lises actions in the books early stages. Of course, who knows her thoughts? Who can tell? [Spark 1974: 50]. Spark is not giving us everything we need to understand Lises psyche, and she directly encourages us to realise this; who knows what shes thinking? For example, the reader is not necessarily fooled by Lises reason for leaving her passport in the taxi. Her actions might mean anything [Spark 1974: 79]. Spark has made detectives of us, rather than her characters. Spark, like many postmodern writers, has chosen not to present her whydunnit in chronological order. Revealing certain information at certain times is crucial for the shock impact of the crime genre, and truly with more traditional murder mysteries, lineality has this effect. However, The Drivers

Seat is a present tense, third person narrative punctuated by future tense flashforwards. It is this structure which prompted David Lodge to call it a crime story turned inside out [Spark 1974: cover]. Playing with chronology is a sinister foreshadowing technique; perhaps even a nihilism inherited from the post-war modernists who could hardly avoid it. Therefore, a presence with a retrospective view is capable of speaking directly to the reader, and once we realise this, it focusses our attention on that presence; the author. Causality is not chronology [McQuillan 2002: 216], said Spark of the postmodern aspects of her fiction; one thing doesnt necessarily lead on to another inevitable thing, although it does lead to something else [McQuillan 2002: 216]. This structural choice has the simple effect of intriguing the reader. Through time shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just one damn thing after another [Lodge year: 75]. This, argues Lodge, encourages us to make connections [Lodge year: 75] and forge our own ideas about the ironic, metaphorical, rhetorical resonances of the author figures self-conscious presence. There is a sly presence of death throughout; out of the blue, we learn that Mr Fiedke passed away [Spark 1974: 54], Lise speaks of last chance[s] [Spark 1974: 55], saying one might be killed any time, you never know [Spark 1974: 55], the dancing girl is likened to a newly beheaded chicken [Spark 1974: 61], and Lise is ironically told you have your life in front of you [Spark 1974: 64]. This may be for similar reasons as to the effect of the structural style. Death, as a theme, is in the authors realm, and therefore something that is exclusively theirs. By tempting the reader with what they do not know, Spark draws attention to herself. This is an essential tool to keep the reader absorbed; we pursue the plot in order to discover what is being deliberately and clearly kept from us. Lise, we slowly discover, has been plotting her own death. One of the more explicit clues is this; So she lays the trail, presently to be followed by Interpol [Spark 1974: 51]. It, in fact, takes the reader out of the drivers seat, as they are told that doom is inevitable and beyond their control. Lise might as well aim for the unavoidable, saying ironically that its foolish to have plans [Spark 1974: 51]. There is a subtle kind of role-reversal which directs the readers attention again to the figure of the author. Spark does this to remind the reader who is in charge and that in a postmodernist text like hers, the ever-changing nature of authorship is not to be forgotten. Many examples fluctuate within the narrative, including Lise and death, Lise and Spark, and Spark and God. This subverts the idea of death being at our heels. Conventionally, death seeks us, as Marvell feared in To His Coy Mistress; at my back I always hear/Times wingd chariot hurrying near. But in The Drivers Seat, it appears to be settled that Lise [is] at his heels [Spark 1974: 26]. Here, his refers to Mrs Fiedkes nephew, her personal agent of death as far as Lise is concerned. Lise is, in fact, at the heels of her own death. In many cases, postmodernist fiction deconstructs itself. Spark and McEwan are writing in a genre as self-destructive as their heroines. Whilst Lise decides its best never to be born. I wish my mother and father had

practised birth-control [Spark 1974: 76], Briony builds up the first two parts of her novel only to unravel all these literary conventions in the incredibly postmodern Part Three. Rooney described Atonement as the development of literary theory in microcosm [Rooney 2006: 126]. Briony constructs what is arguably a modernist style in Part One, by concerning herself with examining human nature in the examples of those around her QUOTE. Part Two has features of a stream of consciousness, following Robbies interior monologue during the war QUOTE. She then proceeds to thoroughly deconstruct these styles in Part Three. There are hints earlier in the book QUOTE, but only in Part Three does the reader fully comprehend the magnitude of the deception on McEwans part. In this self-destruction, attention is drawn to the validity of the author or narrator by openly acknowledging these two roles as irrevocably linked. In Atonement, there are three versions of authors and narrators. McEwan and Briony overlap in many ways; there is the Ian Macabre of twelve novels, the Briony of Part One whom we meet in a third person narrative and have no reason to suspect future closer acquaintance with. And there is the McEwan who attributes the physical copy of the novel in the readers hands to the Briony of 1999. The reader is encouraged to suspend any knowledge of an Ian McEwan in favour of belief in a non-fictional Briony Tallis. It is a remarkable construction. It makes the story real; it is so incredibly postmodern that is now no longer even fiction. To Robbie Turner, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlour game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilised existence [McEwan year: 91]. But (among other things, like qualification and post-adolescent distraction) we study it so that when we come to read a novel like Atonement, the term postmodernism is no longer a mystery. Unlike The Drivers Seat, Atonement does not explicitly highlight the postmodernist features of the author figure until the final chapter. Until then, the reader is content to accept that their narrator is of the traditional, omniscient kind. Birth, death and frailty in between [McEwan year: 93] seems the only concern at first. Perhaps McEwan does this not only for the gratifying effect it has on the reader, but to avoid being allocated any one genre. Atonement is a liminal space between fiction and reality. For Briony, real life [McEwan year: 158] is a reality with fictional features. It is something which can interfere in her personal affairs as an author would in the life of his characters; it had sent her a villain [McEwan year: 158]. She takes it as her responsibility, as someone with an [intense] claim on life [McEwan year: 36] to struggl[e] for [McEwan year: 158] the truth and expose villains who are not, in reality, announced with hisses or soliloquies [McEwan year: 158]. The inherent theme of writing draws attention to the author figure. Literary lexis is used to describe Chapter Two as the fountain episode [McEwan year: 119]. My final draft [McEwan year: 371] is referred to. There is a physical manifestation of the theme of writing; Brionys examination of her hand as a creative machine [McEwan year: 35]. The liminal space is in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between moving and not

moving (between fictionalising and not) when her intention took effect [McEwan year: 35]. If a reader does not understand something, then they turn to the author for answers. By creating this liminality, McEwan reminds the reader that not all the questions can be immediately answered. The metaphysical poets used liminality as something romantic; the postmodernists are using it as something to highlight their role and its importance. Briony herself seems to be searching along with the reader; if she could only find herself at the crest she might find that part of her that was really in charge [McEwan year: 35]. There are various versions of reality, and they all belong to different characters. Chapter Two belongs to Cecilias experience and thought processes. Chapter Three, the same events, belong to Brionys interpretation. A postmodernist reader may, when presented with alternate perspectives, question which of these realities belongs to the author? McEwan has woven a hyperreality of time and repetition. Robbie writes many versions of the note, and the appropriate version is easily confused. This gives the reader a simple initial example of the issue or theme of misconstruing the wrong version of reality, from which to identify more subtle instances. What Briony struggles with is the relationship between fact, and what makes a good story. She is cripplingly Romantic, quite unlike a semi-postmodernist like McEwan. But as she becomes McEwan himself, she deciphers this heiroglyph [McEwan year: page]: How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all [McEwan year: page] The author figure has a serious responsibility. As a creative writer, Briony holds omnipotence over her characters, who are completely vulnerable to her fancies and judgement. Unfortunately, distorted by the navety of an overactive imagination trapped in an uneventful world, her judgement is fatally warped. She instinctively romanticises reality into her own embellished version, and feels trapped between the urge to write a simple diary account and the ambition to make something greater of them [McEwan year: 116]. So as she writes in Part Three, how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? [McEwan year: 350]. Only the postmodernist writer recognises this as an impossibile task [McEwan year: 350]. By being both writer and character, Briony transcends pre-postmodernist conventions and thereby draws attention to her dual-role. Both authors have, through many examples, self-consciously drawn attention to themselves by applying postmodernist features to their fiction. If they did not, their works would lack what gives Spark her command over suspense and what gives McEwan his acute sense of timing.

Spark, Muriel (1974), The Drivers Seat, London, Penguin Modern Classics. McEwan, Ian (), Atonement, Butler, Christopher (2002), Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press. McQuillan, Martin (2002), Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, Hampshire, Palgrave Publishers Ltd. Lodge, David (), The Art Of Fiction,