Propaganda's shadow : a novel about a search for the truth of a life, accompanied by a critical exploration of history, narrative, fiction and memory as modes of making the past present

This thesis, which comprises a creative artefact and an exegesis, has its origins in a longago personal history. The artefact, a novel titled Propaganda's Shadow, is based on the life of my journalist father, Jerome Willis, who died when I was a child. My knowledge of him is fractured, and in a reversal of the assumed norm, I have few memories of the living person, but a wealth of detail about his professional life (he covered momentous events‚ the Spanish Civil War, the Fall of France, the London Blitz, and worked in West Africa, Singapore, France and England). Propaganda's Shadow was born out of this disjuncture, and it self-consciously takes the form of a search for "the truth of a life".

The approach taken (the method, if not methodology) was to write the novel on its own terms and for the exegesis to take up some of the larger questions raised by the kind of novel it turned out to be - which is a historical metafiction of sorts drawing on the writings of Jerome Willis and other accounts of the same times and places, as well as reworked memories and (auto)biographical elements. The themes and storylines of Propaganda's Shadow have been developed from, and are in fact deliberately constrained by, the source material itself - they work with its omissions, errors and blank spots. The structure adopted, an interweaving dual narrative, foregrounds the issue of "the truth of a life" by putting into play the quests of contemporary protagonists for 'the real Jack Watson" (the fictionalised Jerome Willis). The investments and motivations of the questers - Linda and Claire (Jack's daughters) and Markus (researcher and would-be scriptwriter) - not stable, thereby prompting co-operation and conflict at different times. Meanwhile, the life of Jack Watson unfolds in the chapters written from his point of view - or so it would seem.

The relationship between the two elements of the thesis is intentionally oblique. While the exegesis explains and reflects upon some aspects of my novel, the main approach is to look out and away from the creative artefact, situating its theme of "seeking the truth of a life" in a larger frame by engaging other writers and thinkers whose work addresses questions of history, memory, representation and truth.

The exegesis draws out some fundamental questions provoked by the novel. What can be known of past lives? What are the differences between history, historical discourse and historical fiction? How reliable is memory as a source of knowledge about the past? How might we understand connections between lives across time beyond the conventional divide between past, present and future? These questions are refined and engaged via literary and cultural theory, and will be shown to cluster around two interrelated poles: i) seeking "the truth of a life" and ii) modes of making the past present. The modes examined (which overlap) are: history, narrative, fiction and memory.

The structure of the thesis is that it begins with a preface, followed by the text of Propaganda's Shadow (advanced draft, unpublished), then an exegesis.

Chapter 1 of the exegesis does what the afterword of a historical novel might do, exposing the biographical background and sources but taking this further by explaining how the limitations, absences and errors of the source material were used to develop storylines and plot. In genre terms, Propaganda's Shadow could be considered as sitting somewhere between historical fiction (or metafiction) and life writing. The next chapters situate the creative artefact within some of the critical debates about truth and representation that circulate around these genres. Chapter 2 addresses the question of what can be known of the past in general by considering key arguments of critics and theorists from Roland Barthes to Hayden White concerning the truth-effects of realist narrative, and the truth status of historical discourse vis-a-vis historical fiction. Chapter 3 critically reviews the common assumption that life writing is a means of uncovering an authentic self. It does this by considering theories of memory from psychology and phenomenology, going beyond simple declarations of the unreliability of memory to show that there are different types of memory. The main part of the chapter demonstrates how these different types of memory are in play in selected works: memoirs by Mary McCarthy, Jose Saramago and Walter Benjamin, and the prose fiction of W.G. Sebald. My analysis of these texts shows how memory, forgetting and loss are confronted and imaginatively explored, and how these themes connect to memorialising and history. The works selected for discussion share to varying degrees some of the concerns, and approaches of Propaganda's Shadow.