Perseus meets Medusa: Retroactive writing in Andre Gide and John Barth

The traditional metanarrative image for the writer of autobiographical fiction has been the mythological figure of Narcissus, but this is an inaccurate equation which cannot do justice to the complex psychological dynamics of writing autobiographical fiction. This study proposes the mythological pair, Perseus and Medusa, as a more useful analogy for the creation of a fiction which is not a passive reflection of the writer's identity, but an active agent of self-recreation; Andre Gide called such interventional writing "retroactive" in his journals.;In formulating this central Perseus/Medusa metaphor, this study uses the theories of Jacques Lacan, Paul Ricoeur, and other recent literary critics to unfold the nature of retroactive, Persean writing.;In the Gide section, this dissertation concentrates on the three Gidian works which most clearly practice and thematize retroactive writing: The Notebooks of Andre Walter, Marshlands, and The Counterfeiters. All three chapters examine Gide's creation of a desirable personality and moral direction, in fictions which themselves concern artists producing their identities in writing, and find that Gide never determined "what he wanted to be.";John Barth, contrastingly, exploits retroactive writing, not to re-shape his literal personality, but to face down his literary predecessors and create his literary identity. His "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" (novellas in Chimera) emblematize both the promises and the dangers of such retroactive writing, and posit a program which Barth then tries to fulfill in his long epistolary novel, LETTERS, the main focus of this section. LETTERS portrays the difficult process of creating identity by recycling both the literary traditions of the past, and Barth's own previous writing.;In both writers, Perseus becomes a symbol of the writer attempting to confront a presence which originated outside the self but has become deeply internalized (Medusa). For Gide, this presence is the Puritanical upbringing which he could never accept or reject; for Barth, the burden of the past. In both authors, the pursuit of a writing which tries first to attack, then to reconcile and woo Medusa produces a range of moral, psychological and ethical doubts about the powers of writing.