Modernist authors, postmodernist writers: Joyce, Beckett, Rushdie

I analyze the writing of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Salman Rushdie along the writer/author dialectic to show how this tension has led to important misunderstandings about Joyce and Beckett. In my introduction I draw a distinction between the roles of writer and author, using the theoretical programs of several important poststructuralist thinkers in mapping out an interpretive grid through which I study how the liminal space between writing and reality is dealt with in the prose of Joyce, Beckett, and Rushdie.; I focus on Joyce's Dubliners and Beckett's trilogy to demonstrate the postmodern qualities of their texts and their willingness to relinquish their authority and their position as puppeteers in control of their puppet shows. These texts are postmodern because they are reactions against the way in which writers often attempt to pass off fictional texts as believable representations of reality. However, in contrast to this postmodern assault within the text, Beckett and Joyce bring a different sensibility to issues surrounding the presentation of their texts in the physical form of books. In the real world, when it comes to questions of publishing their texts, they are obsessed with maintaining the authority in their lives that they so determinedly question in their texts. Rather than relinquishing control, as their texts argue that authors must do, Joyce and Beckett continue to exert their authority over their works, trying to control every aspect of their publication and their reception in the cultural field.; Then, in my chapter on Midnight's Children, I show how Rushdie composes a text that is about interaction between writing and reality, a text that deals explicitly with this division between the inside and the outside of writing, a text written consciously in the wake of Joyce and Beckett in which he deals with the tension at work in the capturing of reality in writing. Saleem's dual roles as writer and author illustrate the impossible tension that this tension causes in a postmodern world, as he attempts to exert his artistic control over his writing and his life, failing at both. This provides a fitting capstone to the discussion, since Midnight's Children positions itself along the faultline of this dialectical tension.