Arthur evidently struggles dealing with the impossibility of truth, an inherent post-modern theme that fondly parallels the resistance people deploy over the lack of an unchanging objective reality. He becomes deeply perplexed about the role of his father’s forgery in his life for a multitude of contradicting reasons. The idea that we have a text mediated subjectivity is a concept Arthur permeates throughout The Tragedy of Arthur, as he inevitably becomes the text despite his resistance to it. As Arthur writes the introduction to the The Tragedy of Arthur, he simultaneously writes his own tragedy, the same one his father wrote and apparently Shakespeare, not to mention the author himself, Arthur Philips. Every version of Arthur becomes damaged
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His fear of forgery negatively effecting his career contradicts the prominent nature of fiction writing, since Arthur is committing the same forgery that creates this very career. Being an author and writing fiction is inherently deceitful—one is essentially forging human experience from their fragmented perception, which in turn becomes deeply affective for other people. Situationally, one can only manipulate language if they themselves perform it, which brings into question a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s famous quote: “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (Shakespeare). These so-called players can only disassimilate during their immersion into language, becoming a side effect of the language itself—so for the novelist and bard, whether it’s Shakespeare or Arthur, it is through this exposure to their language that one inevitably becomes an obvious side effect, or “walking figment of shakespeare’s imagination” (127). Forgery, in this fashion, becomes a question of magic where the bard is able to instill and perpetuate “magical thinking” continuously, like Foucault’s nodes of distributed power—but not as oppressive. It is through this magic that the text becomes unreliable, due to its multiplicitous nature of intertextuality, gaps, fantastical and residual editing—one cannot always see what’s in the “magic” hat regardless of their …show more content…
This tension conceptualizes a commonly indefinite perception, or perhaps the tension of truth and its muddled duality in the human condition. It is natural to strive towards an objective reality, but when one cannot find a measure of such reality, they become despondent and angry—seeking revenge on inauthenticity through biased claims against a duplicitous nature. This brings attention to the subjective reality the text folds into, where the paradigmatic registers of each version of Arthur come together creating an investigation into the in-between. The Tragedy of Arthur is completely about this in-between state, or as Philip mentions, it “blurs the lines between reality and imagination” (2). Investigating the middle becomes a product of always being in the middle, a space of absence, one that leaves Arthur and the text in a perpetual state of instability—one which he writes, or rather, they all
His fear of forgery negatively effecting his career contradicts the prominent nature of fiction writing, since Arthur is committing the same forgery that creates this very career. Being an author and writing fiction is inherently deceitful—one is essentially forging human experience from their fragmented perception, which in turn becomes deeply affective for other people. Situationally, one can only manipulate language if they themselves perform it, which brings into question a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s famous quote: “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (Shakespeare). These so-called players can only disassimilate during their immersion into language, becoming a side effect of the language itself—so for the novelist and bard, whether it’s Shakespeare or Arthur, it is through this exposure to their language that one inevitably becomes an obvious side effect, or “walking figment of shakespeare’s imagination” (127). Forgery, in this fashion, becomes a question of magic where the bard is able to instill and perpetuate “magical thinking” continuously, like Foucault’s nodes of distributed power—but not as oppressive. It is through this magic that the text becomes unreliable, due to its multiplicitous nature of intertextuality, gaps, fantastical and residual editing—one cannot always see what’s in the “magic” hat regardless of their …show more content…
This tension conceptualizes a commonly indefinite perception, or perhaps the tension of truth and its muddled duality in the human condition. It is natural to strive towards an objective reality, but when one cannot find a measure of such reality, they become despondent and angry—seeking revenge on inauthenticity through biased claims against a duplicitous nature. This brings attention to the subjective reality the text folds into, where the paradigmatic registers of each version of Arthur come together creating an investigation into the in-between. The Tragedy of Arthur is completely about this in-between state, or as Philip mentions, it “blurs the lines between reality and imagination” (2). Investigating the middle becomes a product of always being in the middle, a space of absence, one that leaves Arthur and the text in a perpetual state of instability—one which he writes, or rather, they all