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A Postmodern Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Love Life in Nothing Like the Sun

As a postmodern historical novel, also known as historiographic metafiction, as Linda Hutcheon terms it, Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess reflects revisionist perspectives of postmodernism. With Deconstructionism and New Historicism, there emerges a new perception that emphasizes a dynamic relationship between the historical and the fictive. The fact that there is more similarity between historical narrative and fictive narrative than the distinctions between them casts doubts on the authentic and acknowledged historical narratives. Historical metafiction is a fictional approach to history with a parodic twist that uses and abuses the very historical concepts it challenges. Historical metafiction tries to accomplish this by visibly contradicting the public record of official history and by violating the constraints on classic historical novel. This paper aims to examine the postmodern historicity and its self-consciousness in Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess. This novel confronts the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation and normative/apocryphal history by creating a most unconventional image of a great historical figure. This fictional biography offers a challenging interpretation of the great poet, “Swan of Avon,” through creative imagination and experimental narrative. Based upon Shakespeare’s love sonnets, this novel portrays Shakespeare as a homosexual, desperately in love with a young aristocrat. Shakespeare was also presented to be fatally in love with a “dark” Indian lady, impotent in his relationship with his wife, and in the end dying of syphilis. This reconstructed Shakespeare is rather an embodiment of human anguishes and desires than a genius writer. This novel also reveals its intense self-consciousness about the way in which all this is done. First it plays upon the factual accounts of the life at issue in order to trace fictional deviations from them and sometimes deliberately falsifies them in order to foreground the plausible interpretation and potential understanding of Shakespeare’s life. However, it also manifests a certain introversion of a self-conscious turning toward the form of the act of writing itself. From the beginning Burgess claims that this whole work is a mere lecture to his students over wine. Even though the writer creates an imaginative version of historical and real Shakespeare, the pleasure of reading this work comes from a double awareness of both fictiveness and a basis in the real world. Inventive as much as deconstructive, the result is beyond mere a fact or fiction. As a result, this fictional Shakespeare contributes to an understanding of historical Shakespeare in an ongoing attempt to get at the great writer.

As a postmodern historical novel, also known as historiographic metafiction, as Linda Hutcheon terms it, Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess reflects revisionist perspectives of postmodernism. With Deconstructionism and New Historicism, there emerges a new perception that emphasizes a dynamic relationship between the historical and the fictive. The fact that there is more similarity between historical narrative and fictive narrative than the distinctions between them casts doubts on the authentic and acknowledged historical narratives. Historical metafiction is a fictional approach to history with a parodic twist that uses and abuses the very historical concepts it challenges. Historical metafiction tries to accomplish this by visibly contradicting the public record of official history and by violating the constraints on classic historical novel. This paper aims to examine the postmodern historicity and its self-consciousness in Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess. This novel confronts the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation and normative/apocryphal history by creating a most unconventional image of a great historical figure. This fictional biography offers a challenging interpretation of the great poet, “Swan of Avon,” through creative imagination and experimental narrative. Based upon Shakespeare’s love sonnets, this novel portrays Shakespeare as a homosexual, desperately in love with a young aristocrat. Shakespeare was also presented to be fatally in love with a “dark” Indian lady, impotent in his relationship with his wife, and in the end dying of syphilis. This reconstructed Shakespeare is rather an embodiment of human anguishes and desires than a genius writer. This novel also reveals its intense self-consciousness about the way in which all this is done. First it plays upon the factual accounts of the life at issue in order to trace fictional deviations from them and sometimes deliberately falsifies them in order to foreground the plausible interpretation and potential understanding of Shakespeare’s life. However, it also manifests a certain introversion of a self-conscious turning toward the form of the act of writing itself. From the beginning Burgess claims that this whole work is a mere lecture to his students over wine. Even though the writer creates an imaginative version of historical and real Shakespeare, the pleasure of reading this work comes from a double awareness of both fictiveness and a basis in the real world. Inventive as much as deconstructive, the result is beyond mere a fact or fiction. As a result, this fictional Shakespeare contributes to an understanding of historical Shakespeare in an ongoing attempt to get at the great writer.